Can you believe it? Paul learned all this in three months. Three months! Who would have thought it? Trent Conway, the Henry Higgins of our time. Paul looked at those names and said I am Columbus. I am Magellan. I will sail into this new world. I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. fill in the names. I find that A) tremendously comforting that we’re so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we’re so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It’s not just big names. It’s anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people.
Six Degrees of Separation is a 1990 play written by John Guare that premiered at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, on May 16, 1990, directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Stockard Channing (as Ouisa Kittredge). The production transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theater for its Broadway debut on November 8, 1990.
Six Degrees of Separation explores the existential premise that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in the world by a chain of no more than six acquaintances, thus, “six degrees of separation”.
The plot of the play was inspired by the real-life story of David Hampton, a con man who managed to convince a number of people in the 1980s that he was the son of actor Sidney Poitier. After the play became a dramatic and financial success, Hampton was tried and acquitted for harassment of Guare; he felt he was due a share of the profits that he ultimately never received.
The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase “six degrees of separation”, although Milgram did not use this term himself.
六次の隔たり（Six Degrees of Separation）とは、人は自分の知り合いを6人以上介すと世界中の人々と間接的な知り合いになることができる、という仮説で、多くの人数からなる世界が比較的少ない人数を介して繋がるスモール・ワールド現象の一例とされる。SNSに代表されるいくつかのネットワークサービスはこの仮説が下地になっている。
この仮説は、後述のスタンレー・ミルグラムの実験を裏づけとして大きく広まったが、それ以前から文学作品などを通じて知られていた。この仮説を描いた最古の作品はハンガリーの文学者フリジェシュ・カリンティによる1929年の小説『鎖』とされているが、「六次の隔たり」という名称は、劇作家ジョン・グエアの戯曲に由来する。