On the face of it, this may seem totally impossible. How can we be in contact with president Obama or the former footballer Zida ne, through a chain of only five people? And yet, if we linger over our direct experience, we realize that we have such varied relations and acquaintances that at times they seem unthinkable. If we apply this same reflection to all the people we know and then extend it to the people they know, then the theory of the “six degrees of separation” no longer seems so improbable.
Because in the end, this world is so small and interconnected that it really is possible to believe that each and every one of us is separated, or rather united, by only five inter mediaries.
