Nice old video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEavnS10HI
The Mythbusters proved you can fold it up all the way to 11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Qzc3_NtGs
Why does paper fold so well?
11–20 of 68 posts
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#12[dead]
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#13This is exactly the sort of hard-hitting journalism that makes me proud to pay my TV licence.
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#14And why does it sink. Its basically squished wood!
Because the air is squished out I suppose
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#15Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
And once you have created such a straight line, you can fold the paper again such that the first crease lines up on both sides of the new crease, and then you have a right angle.
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#16Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
> The underlying reason is that paper does not stretch I don't think that's sufficient--tinfoil doesn't stretch, but it doesn't fold nearly as neatly as paper.
"Paper folds in a straight line" and I was like "duh! what else?" Until I read this comment, and it bought back all the memories where I tried to fold other things like plastic sheets and tin foils and how they never ended in straight line...damn. I never noticed...
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#17Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
And once you have created such a straight line, you can fold the paper again such that the first crease lines up on both sides of the new crease, and then you have a right angle.
Indeed !
One can create an axiomatic system of geometry through such coincident folds (as an alternative to straight-edge and compass) and it turns out to be more powerful than the Euclidean system.
One can construct cube roots, trisect angles.
Depending on the choice of paper folding axioms one can go beyond cube roots and k-secting angles to the entire set of algebraic numbers.
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#18Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
I'm a fan of tearing paper along a crease rather than cutting it for this reason, since the tear is straight and using scissors will invariably be all over the place.
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#19Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
I'm a fan of tearing paper along a crease rather than cutting it for this reason, since the tear is straight and using scissors will invariably be all over the place.
Yup and if you need a right angle, combine it with this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538771
by roelschroeven.
I often wondered how to ensure that the corners of a sheet of paper make a right angle. You need that to form a square sheet, otherwise the standard trick of folding along the diagonal gives a rhombus, not a square.
Re: Why does paper fold so well?
#20Oh no! woe is me, they don't highlight my absolutely, ridiculously favourite fact/curiosity about a sheet of smooth paper: If you fold it clean, the crease is a straight line. In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly, meaning without transporting one existing straight edge to another (*). I remember spending a lot of enamored time coming up with different geometrica…
> In fact I don't know of any other good way of obtaining a straight edge from scratch quickly
A string made taut between two points is surely a better way? And works at much bigger sizes too (people build walls and foundations using this technique all the time). The paper is less useful in practice because any paper you find is probably straight and square anyway.
Still, I had fun thinking about this as I definitely hadn't considered it before.