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The Physics of Discarded Paper

February 9th, 2012 - by Robby Slaughter

Crumple it up, toss it away. We all know that feeling. But apparently, discarded jumbles of paper are a huge mystery in physics.

A piece recently published in New Scientist discusses the
the peculiar physics of crumpled paper. From the piece:

How can a sheet of paper become an unaccountably tough projectile simply by the act of crushing? The answer might seem simple, but it turned out that finding a sound explanation required complex instruments and a lot of brain power. Now, though, Cambou and Menon, physicists at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, have come up with some unexpected answers.

crumpled paper failure
Photo © Flickr User Turinboy

That’s just one of the mysteries of this everyday object. But scientists have discovered many more, including:

One property of crumpled paper remained, though, resisting all forms of analysis. No matter how tightly you crumple paper into a ball, you’ll be hard-pressed to come up with a structure composed of less than about 90 per cent air. “It’s technically possible to compress them further,” says Cambou, “but that will take a lot more force because the crumpled sheet increasingly opposes the external force as it’s crushed.”

If you begin to think about crumbled paper, it’s actually quite fascinating. We pack heavy objects into boxes filled with crumbled paper, and it supports and cushions their weight just fine. This is despite the fact that a piece of paper only has a fraction of the mass of whatever it’s holding up!

Failure is the secret to success. If you’re looking for a new field of research, you may need to focus on what others have already discarded. And even if you’re tossing something away, it might be the foundation of an entirely fresh point of view.

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