Six degrees of Kevin Bacon is no urban myth
Posted February 14th, 2009 at 12:08 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor
2 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Video
What do climate change, Kevin Bacon, the snowy tree cricket, Al Qaeda, HIV, the World Wide Web, and your address book have in common? They’ve all played a role in a major science discovery –- the hidden language of networks.
“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” is a new BBC documentary that unfolds the science behind the popular trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” whose notion that anyone on the planet can be connected in just six steps of association was supposed to be an urban myth.
The film follows two young scientists, Harvard’s Laszlo Barabasi and Yahoo! Research’s very own Duncan Watts, as they work to uncover the pervasive law that nature uses to organize itself. By studying vast natural and man-made networks — from the connections between Hollywood actors to the nervous system of a worm, the U.S. electric power grid and the WWW — they discover that diverse systems share a common blueprint. It takes us from the hunt for Saddam Hussein to the front-lines of cancer research and shows that the Six Degrees principle doesn’t just relate to people but also to viruses, web pages, neurons, species, molecules, and even fashion.
Watts, a former Australian Navy officer with a passion for extreme rock climbing, was a professor at Columbia University at just 29. He launched the explosion in the new science of networks while studying crickets and the mechanism that allows them to chirp in unison. He’s the author of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.” Yodel Anecdotal will post a full interview with Watts soon.
“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” premieres tomorrow night on the Science Channel. Check your local cable listings for times.
Here’s the trailer:
Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor
Tagged: Cool Stuff, duncan watts, Video, yahoo research
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2 Comments Add your own
Tom Nocera | February 15th, 2009 at 6:53 am
According to Bruce H. Harrison, co-founder of the Family Forest Project in Hawaii, our “connectedness” can now be shown to be much closer than the 6 degrees currently being discussed. In fact, it may be much closer to half that number, based on Harrison’s discoveries and insights made as he works to precisely link and document our deepest known family histories. His research not only shows how closely related our human family is, it maps the precise pathways of our ancestral migrations going back over 3000 years. To gauge the scope of his nearly 14 years of digitizing old “dead tree” media, the ebooks being produced from Harrison’s research are the largest ebooks in the world.
Alexis | March 23rd, 2009 at 2:48 am
See how many people Kevin Bacon is connected to in the “Family Forest Project” here:
http://www.familyforest.com/captainslog/67.html
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