Its A Small World After All

During the past week we had our family with us here in Colorado for the annual Christmas gathering. The joy of being again with family and friends at this time of the year gives me reason to share what I received from, Bob, my friend and correspondent some time back. He wrote about the much mentioned theory that everyone in the world is separated by at most five acquaintances. As it turns out, the theory was first proposed back in the 1930s (my favorite decade) by a Hungarian writer. Here are the details from Bob and from an article in Wikipedia.

Who came up with the theory of six degrees of separation? The theory that everyone in the world is separated by at most five acquaintances was first proposed in a 1929 short story by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. The story was called "Chains," and while the six degrees theory was a purely fictional conceit, the idea proved popular.

In 1967, psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to test the theory by sending several letters to random people in the Midwest. The letter featured the name, address, and occupation of a single person on the East Coast; participants were asked to forward the letters to the people who they thought were most likely to know the person. It took an average of five intermediaries to reach the target.

The experiment came into some scrutiny afterwards, but the results were published in Psychology Today and gave birth to the phrase "six degrees of separation."

In the Cornell Magazine on/line Beth Saulnier explains how two Cornell engineers proposed a mathematical basis for it. Their work, which prompted a minor media frenzy when it was published in the journal Nature in June, 2001, could have implications for dozens of disciplines, from economics to epidemiology to entomology. For instance, how do diseases spread? Can anyone break into the old-boy network? Can an accident at a single power station bring down the rest of the grid? How does a joke spread across the Internet? Why do women's menstrual cycles synchronize when they live together? How are the neurons of the brain connected? Can you prevent a crowd from panicking? How do you design the most efficient office building?

Playwright John Guare popularized the term with his 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, about a wealthy couple tricked by a charismatic con man claiming to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier. The play later became a 1993 film starring a then up-and-coming Will Smith. Guare says he got his inspiration for the Six Degrees concept from a comment by Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph.

But get this -- the original 1967 experiment was repeated in 2001 with email, and the same results came back! So give it a try yourself. As the song says, "It's Small World After All.""