{"id":758,"date":"2007-03-12T20:17:21","date_gmt":"2007-03-12T19:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/2007\/03\/12\/it-s-a-small-world\/"},"modified":"2008-08-02T18:33:32","modified_gmt":"2008-08-02T16:33:32","slug":"it-s-a-small-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2007\/03\/it-s-a-small-world\/","title":{"rendered":"It’ s a small world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes erroneously described as global village<\/a> phenomenon the notion of a small world<\/a> goes back to an experiment by Stanley Milgram (who became famous with the “obedience to authority” experiment – I did not know until last weeks that the punishing experiments had been repeated here in Munich<\/a> where 85 percent of the subjects continued until to the end!).<\/p>\n

The small world theory says that everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of social acquaintances. The concept gave rise to the famous phrase of phrase six degrees of separation – I believe that a scientist may even reach another scientist in 4-5 steps. <\/p>\n

My first PubNet<\/a> example here is to reach F. Sanger by joint co-authors. This doesn’t work – my estimate would be 3 intermediary steps.<\/p>\n

\"smallw01.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My second PubNet example is to reach N. Morton (the foreword of his anniversary book says that a qualification of a genetic epidemiologist can be counted as “Newton”-points – the number of joint publications with Professor Morton).<\/p>\n

\"smallw2.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Addendum 8\/7\/08<\/h3>\n

Arxive.org<\/a> has the largest study so far: 6,6 steps in 30 billion messenger conversations among 240 million people.<\/p>\n\n

 <\/p>\n

\n CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 03.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes erroneously described as global village phenomenon the notion of a small world goes back to an experiment by Stanley Milgram (who became famous with the “obedience to authority” experiment – I did not know until last weeks that the punishing experiments had been repeated here in Munich where 85 percent of the subjects continued … Continue reading It’ s a small world<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13,14,2946,794,795,793,792],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-science","tag-history-insights","tag-human-rights","tag-philosophy-of-science","tag-munich","tag-small-world","tag-social_psychologist","tag-stanley_milgram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}