Dear Sun, how far are you?

Algebra Level 4

Suppose you have a very very large piece of paper (maybe larger than the surface area of planets) of thickness of about one-tenth of a millimeter. You tear the paper into half and place the two halves one upon the other. Again you tear the resulting sheet (consisting of two sheets of paper) into half and repeat the procedure. If you repeat this process many many times, then the thickness of the papers will increase very much.

Approximately how many times will you have to continue the process in order to reach the SUN ?

P.S. Don't google the answer to this problem. You will lose the fun.
You can google for other information that you might need.


The answer is 50.

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2 solutions

Burhan Uddin
Oct 23, 2014

Here the width of folded paper is increasing exponentially.

So

d = w × 2 t d = w \times 2^{ t }

where

d = distance to the sun = 1.496x10^11 m

w = width of paper = 0.1 mm = 1x10^-4 m

t = number of paper folds

solving the above equation we get

d w = 2 t \frac { d }{ w } \quad ={ \quad 2 }^{ t } log 2 d w = log 2 2 t \log _{ 2 }{ \frac { d }{ w } } \quad ={ \quad \log _{ 2 }{ { 2 }^{ t } } } t = log 2 d w t\quad =\quad \log _{ 2 }{ \frac { d }{ w } } t = log 2 1.496 × 10 11 1 × 10 4 t\quad =\quad \log _{ 2 }{ \frac { 1.496\times { 10 }^{ 11 } }{ 1\times { 10 }^{ -4 } } } t = 50.41 t\quad =\quad 50.41\quad \\

So we can reach to the SUN in approximately 50 folds

Why is 51 wrong?

Haicheng Li - 4 years, 5 months ago

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Because you'd go over the sun if you do that .

Vlad Vasilescu - 4 years, 4 months ago

Yeah ,why is 51 wrong?

Yukthesh Venkat - 4 years, 4 months ago
Dennis Lu
Jan 3, 2017

Quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation:

Assume the sun is ~100 million miles away from the Earth and that a mile is ~1000 meters (really it's closer to 1600, but since the distance to the sun could be off by more than a factor of 1.6, this is probably fine). Letting n n denote the number of folds, our equation is

2 n × 1 0 4 1 0 8 × 1 0 3 2^n \times 10^{-4} \approx 10^8 \times 10^3

2 n 1 0 15 2^n \approx 10^{15}

Using the approximation 2 10 1 0 3 2^{10}\approx 10^3 , we get n 50 n \approx 50 .

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