How many times can you fold a piece of paper? There’s a myth that you cannot fold it perfectly in half more than eight times, but given a large enough piece of paper, and using powerful hydraulic equipment, you could fold a piece of paper as many times as you wanted. The Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube decided to use this exact type of equipment to fold a piece of A3-sized paper seven times, something that is considerably difficult to do using just human hands. After attempting to fold it for the eighth time, however, it appears to cause the paper to explode, transforming the remnants into brittle, fractured pieces.
For any bit of paper, after the first fold, it doubles in thickness. Another fold, and it quadruples in thickness. By the seventh fold, it would have become 128 times thicker than it was originally. This is known as exponential growth, and explains why a piece of ordinary paper folded 23 times would be a kilometer (0.62 miles) thick. Forty-two folds will stretch out to the Moon, and 103 folds will expand beyond the observable universe.
http://www.iflscience.com/physics/why-does-paper-appear-explode-when-its-folded-eight-times
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