Trying to be clever eh? Well yes - the UJ Research Department is very clever. It's the old-age question that many have tried to answer and none have completed.

You are about to find out the REAL answer as to how long a piece of string is, and believe me - it's not easy to work out! The answer is also different for every piece of string on earth, but the theory remains the same.
     

Now there are very funny people out there who don't take these kind of things very serious. Whilst doing some background research on this question, I came across a few answers, none of them very detailed:

'It is twice as long as half the length' - yes, funny, but not very detailed.
and this - 'It is half as long as twice the length' - hmmm, I see a pattern here but no mathematical break-down.

Bored with similar answers, I took the matter into my own hands....
     
  Now - I could have been funny and said that a piece of string is about 23cm long (similar to the one pictured) - but i'm not funny. I am the head of the Unplanned Journey Research Department.
     
 

To begin, I discovered that this particular piece of string had three parts to it (The blu-tac is here purely to seperate the individual lengths).

I recently read somewhere that string was invented in the stone age, but I can't confirm this.

So far, this piece of string is 3 times longer than you originally thought it was. When I talk about length, i'm talking about it's total length.
     
 

I then seperated these three pieces to give me three seperate pieces.

The fancy blue background is my bed cover.
     
 

I took one of the three pieces and seperated the end of that. The string demonstrated here is of man-made fibres. At a guess, I would say it was polyester. That actually has nothing to do with this research, but there you go.

So I set about counting each individual thread...
 

It took me approx 50 minutes to count each individual thread, and the final result was 4,357.

Here are the results:
Boring - yes
Exciting - no
Tedious - yes
Fiddly - a pain in the arse
Select thoughts whilst counting - wanna be in bed, sex, food, what's on tv etc

Just to show you how small the threads were, I used another piece of research blu-tac to hold up a one penny piece next to the strands.
And here is a close-up of said strand.
 

So? How long is a piece of string?

It's 3 x 4,357 of the length you originally thought it was (in this case. You would need to conduct your own research to confirm your own length)

My original piece of string was 23cm - in reality, it's total length is 300,633cm - 30, 063.3m - 3,336.33km.

So now you know. When asked the question, you reply with: "It is twice as long as half the length multiplied by 13,071" (in this case)

If I needed to wrap a piece of string around the earth once (40076km), it would only have to be 3066.02m in length.

Ok, I'm officially a geek. Where do you want to go next? Have you seen the 'How Big?' Section yet?
   
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