Are there really six degrees of separation between any person on the planet?
Yes. Read this story from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7539329.stm ” The theory of six degrees of separation has long captured people’s imagination – notably inspiring a popular 1993 film – but had recently seemed discredited…The idea of six degrees of separation was conceived by US academic Stanley Milgram, after experiments in which he asked people to pass a letter only to others they knew by name. The aim was to get it, eventually, to a named person they did not know living in another city. The average number of times it was passed on, he said, was six – hence, the six degrees of separation. However, in July 2006, Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram’s original research notes and discovered that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach their target. She suggested that the six degrees theory might be the academic equivalent of an urban myth… Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn insta
I do not know about 6 degrees of separation but the idea that most of us are closer linked than we think is probably true. There’s a good book for spotting the connection. It’s “The Lunar Men” by Jenny Uglow, about the amateur science club in Birmingham, England in the late 1700s. One of the members taught mathematics to Thomas Jefferson, several of them knew Ben Franklin, and some had met King George III. Some of them knew Joseph Banks who shipped with James Cook. Cook discovered and mapped the east coast of Australia and all of the coast of New Zealand. He also charted the St Lawrence river, which led to the defeat of the French at Montreal and the British domination of Canada. One of the members was James Watt, who improved the steam engine. Another discovered oxygen and invented soda water. A third was Josiah Wedgwood whose blue pottery is still sold. A fourth was Erasmus Darwin, supposedly the best medico in England at the time and the paternal grandfather of Charles Darwin. Watt
