It was the Vintage Paper Fair in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where old picture postcards were going for either 25 cents or $475, depending on which bin you poked around in.

Once printed, cut out, and folded, the models typically only stand 3 to 4 inches tall, but the scale varies depending on the paper size used. Bergen designed the models for 11×17 paper (A3).

In time, a semblance of order emerged. Crumpled wads of paper are no doubt as old and commonplace as paper itself – “graves for failed theories”, Gottesman, a physicist, has called them.

“We chopped the bindings with a paper cutter and made three more copies,” Leslie said. “Then we went to work on them.” No changes or edits were made to any of the transcripts.

To uncover the physical explanation for why paper crumples in this unexpectedly predictable fashion, Andrejevic and her team focused on the flat sections (which they call "facets") of a crumpled ...