I am sure that few people have ever heard of Guglielmo Marconi nor Frigyes Karinthy. I mean who can even pronounce those names if you’re an American? Frigyes Karinthy was a Hungarian author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator while Guglielmo Marconi was a Italian inventor. Each man though brought something to the table regards our connectivity and connectedness, otherwise known as the six degrees of separation.

Six Degrees of Separation was also a very bad 1993 movie that I imagine Will Smith doesn’t put at the top of his favorite list.

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains.

But, there was an even earlier articulation of six degrees of separation by Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi in his Nobel Prize speech in 1909. Marconi attempted to compute how many radio relay stations would be required to cover the globe, and came up with an average of 5.83 based on his transmission experiments at Poldho on the coast of Cornwall. The shrinking world is getting smaller thanks by and large to the internet.

In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called “the small-world problem.” He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient’s name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram’s findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase “six degrees of separation.”

We have more than enough information- we now need transformation!We are ONE in the spiritual realm. And we are one in the physical realm- we just don’t want to recognize that. I sense that between now and the year 2012 that you’ll see an ever increasing coming togther and that’s just one reason I believe Barack Obama is riding the wave he’s on. He brings together the racial divide in his physical body and he brings together the religious divide is his name and heritage.

It’s a strange world isn’t it!

• analysis of six degrees of separation movie
• five degrees of separation psychology
• hungarian writer frigyes karinthy in a short story called chains