How can folding a paper 42 times reach the moon?

Question

How can folding a paper 42 times reach the moon?

In: Physics

Answer 1

Everytime you fold a paper it doubles in thickness.

Start with .1mm

Folds thickness

1 .2

2 .4

3 . 8

4 1.6

5 3.2

So you can see in 5 folds our paper has grown to 32x the thickness. Imagine 37 more folds.

In fact given that we start with 0.1mm our thickness follows a nice relation that is t = (2^x ) /10 where x is the number of folds.

For example X = 2, t = 0.4mm

So using 42 we get t = (2^42 ) / 10 mm = 439804651110.4 mm or

439804 km

The distance between the earth and moon is

384,400

So you can see on the 41st fold we would be at a thickness of ~200,000 km and with one more fold we would be past the moon.