Conville & Walsh

Me. Britney Spears. A chain. Three other people. No, it’s not the opening line from some seedy sordid celebrity memoir but an example of something called The Small World Effect or Six Degrees of Separation. The idea, first espoused in 1929 by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy and bolstered by the work of people like psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, is that anyone on the planet can be connected any other person by a chain of six or fewer individuals. In a number of experiments (some conducted independently and quite recently by Professors Duncan Watts and Richard Wiseman), it has been shown that the effect is quite real. And often it takes fewer than six. In my example above, there were just three: I have a friend called John Coppinger who works as a sculptor for the film industry. In 1996 he was employed to build creatures for the film The Fifth Element and worked directly to the film’s costume designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. Gaultier famously designed Madonna’s iconic pointy bra for her 1985 Blonde Ambition tour. And Madonna snogged Ms Spears at the VMA Awards in 2003. Me, John, Jean-Paul, Madge, Britters. That’s how it works.

I first started studying this effect while researching a book about luck. My position was – and now absolutely is – that luck does not exist. It’s a fallacy. What we call luck is merely being on the beneficial side of a chance event. Of course, you can learn to ‘make your own luck’ by doing things that make you more likely to be in the right place at the right time when such a chance event happens (the aforementioned Richard Wiseman has written a couple of excellent books on the subject). But luck itself as an entity? Dame Fortune? Barry Fate? Absolute cods. Anyway, as I was reading about the nature of coincidence, I quickly discovered that coincidences are very, very, very common. Millions of them happen every picosecond. We just don’t see them unless they are significant to us. It could be that everyone who reads this article has the same birthday as me. That’s some coincidence. But none of us will be aware of it unless I publish my date of birth, so the coincidence is missed. Incidentally, if you randomly select 23 people and put them in a room together, it is an almost mathematical certainty that two or more of them will have the same date of birth. You see? The world is full of wonderful facts like this. And that was where my book JOINED-UP THINKING came from.

As I worked my way through hundreds of books and websites and academic journals, certain facts would jump out at me and connect with other facts I’d already read. For instance, while reading about Sir Isaac Newton’s supposedly ‘lucky’ eureka moment with the falling apple, I became side-tracked by the fact that he apparently invented the colour indigo to explain why light, when split by a prism, only splits into six colours. Newton expected seven colours as he was an alchemist as well as a scientist and believed in the so-called ‘Law of sevens’ (seven orifices of the body, seven notes in music, seven planetary bodies (known at the time), seven levels of Heaven etc.). This in turn reminded me of some research I’d done into the number seven in popular culture and why it’s called ‘Lucky Seven’ by gamblers (it’s because it’s the most likely number to turn up in a throw of two dice and opposing sides of a die always add up to seven). Suddenly sevens were leaping out of the literature all around me … including the seven dwarfs. And then I recalled a story about a dwarf actor hanging himself on the set of MGM’s Wizard of Oz because of his unrequited love for Judy Garland. This turned out to be an urban myth but led me to a curious theory that the film synchronises with Pink Floyd’s seminal 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon. If you start them both at the same time, there are all kinds of weird coincidences that occur between film and prog-rock soundtrack. Of course, I had to have a go, and while looking at George Hardie’s now famous CD cover, I realised that there were only six colours coming out of the prism … A sudden thought struck me. It was my eureka moment. Everything can be connected to everything else. I started setting myself challenges to see if I could find connections between the most randomly unrelated facts. Could I, for instance, find links between the Eiffel Tower and Count Dracula? Or between Dolly the Sheep and the Asteroid Belt? Or even between Coldplay and the Black Death? As it turned out, I could and did. And it often took no more than three or four linking facts to do so. 

It was only later that I realised that these links could be formed into chains and, in turn, into circular chains like those found on a bicycle or around a rapper’s neck. The number seven, for example, could be linked to alchemy, then to Isaac Newton, to prisms, to Pink Floyd, to The Wizard of Oz, to dwarves and back to seven again. And after I’d created thirty of these tidy little circles, I found I had a book’s worth.

Everything can be connected to everything else. You just need to find the missing links.

Oh, and my birthday? August the 11th. Is that a coincidence for you?