No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 8 times. (In fact, the current record is already 12 times, it is held by Britney Gallivan).
Reality: If you have a large enough sheet of paper - and enough energy to fold it - you can fold it as many times as you like. However, there is one problem: If you fold it 103 times, the stack of paper will be more than the size of the known universe - 93 billion light years. Seriously.
But how can a sheet one-tenth of a millimeter thick become larger than the universe?
The answer is simple: Exponential growth. The thickness of an average sheet of paper is 1/10 millimeter. If you fold it in half perfectly, it doubles in thickness. But then things get really interesting.
The third fold will give you the thickness of a human nail.
Seven folds - and you have a notebook thickness of 128 pages.
10 - and the thickness of the paper will be approximately the width of your palm.
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23 - and you get a kilometer-high stack of paper.
30 folds will take you into space. At this point, your leaf will be 100 kilometers high.
Continue folding. 42 folds will take you to the moon. 51 - and you will find yourself in the Sun.
Now quickly scroll down to fold 81 and you have a stack of paper that is 127,786 light years thick - roughly the diameter of the Andromeda Nebula (which is roughly 141,000 light years).
90 folds will give 130.8 million light years - more than the Virgo Supercluster, which has a diameter of about 110 million years. The Virgo supercluster contains a local galactic group that includes the Andromeda Nebula, our own Milky Way, and about a hundred other galaxies.
Finally, in 103 folds, you will go beyond the observable universe, which is roughly 93 billion light-years in diameter.
Olga Minnekhanova