Corndog!
I have a nephew named Corndog. Recently, I was telling a story about him to a friend of mine. He stopped me mid-sentence: “Wait, your brother named his son Corndog?” Uh, no; his real name is not Corndog but he is known far and wide by that moniker.
Corndog is my oldest nephew. Before he was born I was trying to decide what I was going to call him. Calling him Connor, his real name, was out of the question. So, I floated a couple different names. I first thought of the nickname “Con-man,” not bad; certainly serviceable if not inspired. Next, I came up with “Con-dog,” not exceedingly clever; I would classify it in the same group with Con-man. Then something interesting happened, the expectant mother caught wind of “Con-dog.” She said the name was totally unacceptable because it sounded too much like Corndog. In an instant, a nickname was born.
A few years later, Corndog got a brother. I considered calling him Sheepdog or Hot Dog but I settled on Z, in retrospect I believe that was the right choice. He definitely looks and acts like a Z. I have given it some thought and I think Z is the coolest letter in the alphabet. G? No way. M? No chance. I’m confident in my choice.
This essay is about a problem I gave Corndog when he was 7. We were at a surprise birthday party for his mom when I called him over and told him I had a little puzzle for him. I asked him to assume he had a piece of paper that could be folded in half 50 times; if he were to do this how big would the lump of paper be? You can either envision a magic piece of paper that can be folded that many times or you can just imagine adding a sheet of paper to represent the first fold, then two more to represent the second fold, four for the third, and so on. If you think about it for a bit you will see it is the same difference.
For many years I have been asking people this question and the typical answer is always a couple inches, a few feet, or maybe a little taller. I think the most anyone has ever gone is about 10 feet. So, how thick do you think the stack would be? Go ahead and think about it for a bit. The answer will surprise you.
A typical sheet of paper is about 0.1 mm thick (0.0000001 km). You’re right, that is not very thick. The thing is, if you had a special sheet of paper that could be folded 50 times you would create an unimaginably large stack. How large? Well, if you take a sheet of paper 0.0000001 km thick and fold it 50 times you end up with a stack reaching 112,589,990.7 km. For some perspective, the moon is less than 400,000 km away. The sun is about 150,000,000 km away, more or less. Wow, 50 folds of a sheet of printer paper get us way past the moon; good grief, it nearly reaches to the sun.
This little question is another one of those “huh, really?” problems that I love. Once again, our feeble human intuition has miserably failed us. I would hate to leave us all feeling bad about ourselves so I have decided to end this essay on a high note. I think we are all going to smile when you read the following short quote from the 7-year-old version of Corndog. When I told him that if he folded a piece of paper 50 times the resulting thickness would just about reach the sun he responded in the only way the coolest 7-year-old alive possibly could. He looked at me excitedly with big, wide eyes and said: “Let’s do it!” Corndog, my man, you are preaching to the choir.
