The Six Degrees of Separation

Have you ever heard about six degrees separation? Well, it’s an unproved theory by the way. The six degrees theory itself means that everybody’s just connected to each other in six chains. What chains? How to prove it?

Chains here could be anything. People, for instance, they are connected to another even unknown people in six chains. The chains could be links, friends, steps, and many more. That means that we have six degrees away from Fernando Torres, Nicholas Cage, or even Barrack Obama. Still have a blurry vision, right?

The theory has been proved several times by the researchers. The first researchers were Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. They asked around 300 people to send mails to some people somewhere. Of course they weren’t told where the addresses, name only. All they got to do was to send the mails to their friends that maybe knew the target people. They used their friends as the chain. What happened next then?

From around 300 mails that need to be sent, only 64 mails reached the target. And guess what, the average number of friends of separation was 6.2. It needed between five and seven chains maybe. Was it amazing thing that you have never imagined?

That was from the 1990s, and know the researchers from the millennium era, the 2000s. There were some researchers from Columbia University in New York. They asked more than 24.000 people to send e-mails to 18 target people in 13 countries. Wasn’t it crazy?

The result said that only 384 emails were sent to the targets. And the average length in all the chains was between five and seven steps. Another touchdown.

The conclusion is, from those example above, the theory says that we are just separated six degrees away from another. We are one degree from everyone we know, and two degrees from everyone they know, and so on. It is extremely unbelievable, we could say. But don’t you think that this planet is small?

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