The real experiment that people have always been interested in is how many times a piece of paper can be folded in half. After calculation, if a piece of paper is folded in half one hundred and three times, its thickness will not be able to hold the universe. This sounds strange, but the fact is that you are not deceived. If you have A4 paper around, you can try to fold it in half yourself, and you will find that This is really an incredible thing. You will find it very difficult to fold it in half after you fold it six times. If you want to fold in half for the seventh time, you must use tools.
Of course, some people will say that it is because the paper is too small. If there is a piece of paper large enough, it can be folded in half many times. In fact, the world record for folding paper in half is only 13 times up to now.
On December 5, 2011, a group of teachers and students from St. Mark’s High School in Texas, USA, found a piece of rolled paper with a length of four kilometers and prepared to conduct a crazy paper folding experiment. However, after four hours of effort, the paper was finally folded in half only 13 times, and the thickness of the rolled paper reached 8192 layers, which may be the limit of the folding experiment.
Then let’s go back to the question of the A4 paper. Suppose there is a piece of paper as thick as A4 paper, but with an infinite area, what will happen if it is folded in half?
The incredible thing happened again. The thickness of an A4 paper is about 0.14mm. For the convenience of calculation, we set the thickness of the paper as 0.1 mm, and assume that there will be no gaps when it is folded in half. Under such conditions, when we fold it in half, its thickness will be doubled. However, in the beginning, the increase in paper thickness may not be obvious. After five folds in half, the number of layers of paper will reach 32, that is, the thickness of a notebook, but more than one meter, It takes a full 14 folds in half to achieve this. After 23 folds in half, the thickness has reached one kilometer. After 27 folds in half, the paper thickness theory has reached 13000 meters, which is far higher than the height of the first peak, Mount Everest.
If you continue to fold it in half 30 times, its thickness can reach 100 kilometers. If you put it on the ground, the top has entered outer space. When you fold it in half 39 times, the thickness of the paper is almost 55,000 kilometers. You can easily circle the earth’s equator once, and continue to fold it in half 42 times. Its thickness reaches 400,000 kilometers, which has exceeded the distance between the earth and the moon of 380,000 kilometers, When we folded the paper in half for the eighty-fourth time, the thickness was about 200000 light years, which was far larger than the diameter of the Milky Way, 10 light years,
The thickness of the paper will be as high as 13.09 million kilometers by the ninetieth fold, and the diameter of the local galaxy cluster of dozens of galaxies, including the Milky Way, will be only 10 million light years. After the ninetieth fold, the paper thickness will even be as high as 8.3 billion light years, which is far greater than the diameter of the La Niacaia supercluster. Finally, we will only fold it to the 103rd fold, Its thickness is about 100 billion light-years,
We know that the diameter of the known observable universe is only 93 billion light years. But when a piece of paper has been folded in half 103 times, its thickness has exceeded this range. Is it incredible? But this is the magic of exponential explosion. The original 103rd power is such a terrible figure that it can make a piece of paper only 0.1 mm thick, and eventually, even the universe cannot be filled, Although a piece of paper cannot be folded in half 103 times in reality, and there is no such large paper for us to fold in half, we must also recognize the reality that the universe is observable. Maybe the distance of the whole universe is not beyond 93 billion light years. Is there a more vast and unpredictable space?
