The World Is Smaller Than We Think : Society: A new movie revives the hypothesis of the ultimate link between any two people.

“Six Degrees of Separation,” a hit Broadway play, has now opened as a movie, and its intriguing title may enter the books of familiar quotations. It refers, without credit, to a thesis developed some years ago by a serious researcher at MIT, which I think has relevance today to President Clinton’s fellow Rhodes scholars.

I came across that connection while writing a book about the Fulbright program, which sends 5,000 scholars into other countries each year. Like the Rhodes scholars, they create a “small world” of lifetime reactions. And like Clinton, who has taken many of his Rhodes cronies to the White House, they have an impact on the larger world.

The white woman in “Six Degrees” is thrilled to hear that a young black man who suddenly appears in her apartment has connections with her family and friends. She intones the title line almost prayerfully; to her, the black-white separation has suddenly dissolved and a world of connections seems possible.

In the 1950s, Ithiel de Sola Pool, a world-renowned communications scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had the idea that seven intermediaries, at most, were sufficient to link most pairs of people in the world. Manfred Kochen, who helped Pool design a mathematical formula for proving the idea, called it the “small-world phenomenon”: Two people with no apparent ties to one another meet for the first time and discover an acquaintance in common. One is likely to exclaim, “It’s a small world, isn’t it? “

Such happenings have considerable value. At root, they are the basis for international exchanges of scholars. The participants’ lives are forever changed by the new friends and cultures they encounter abroad. Such connections have political as well as scholarly implications. It is easier to negotiate with friends or even adversaries abroad if significant actors in each country have had sound education in the other’s customs, interests and aspirations.

At home, a similar process is common. Kochen observes that “the widespread availability of good connections, direct and indirect, and their systematic use” extensively employs personal networks, for example, in job-seeking, commercial sales and lobbying Congress. Ithiel Pool, as I knew him, was deeply concerned with encouraging access to political movers in a democratic society. He regarded the new communications technologies as the ultimate link in personal networking.

The eminent political scientist Karl W. Deutsch brought Pool and Kochen together in 1957. Pool had already conceived such networking as a fit subject for scholarly and scientific research. He recognized the degrees of separation as a phenomenon requiring mathematical proof. Kochen would provide that expertise. For 20 years, they labored over the problem. Finally, in 1978, they published their working paper in the first issue of Social Networks. That paper stimulated interest by other scholars.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgrim devised “the small-world method,” a passport to be sent to many acquaintances, enabling one to trace the course of the paper, like the movement of a chain letter. Theodore Newcomb, also a social psychologist, described “the acquaintance process” in the fashion of his academic specialty. All three--Pool, Milgrim and Newcomb--died in 1984. But their work continues.

Deutsch, writing in Kochen’s book, “The Small World” (Ablex, 1989), mentions the suggestion made by four scholars: that 20 large polling samples of Americans could reveal the typical network sizes for a variety of citizens. This could be determined, for example, by asking whether the respondent knew personally anyone killed in the Vietnam War or by a drunk driver in the past 12 months or anyone infected by AIDS or anyone in some other group of known size. From this, the “degree of separation” could begin to be formalized.

This research has other valuable potentials. By learning the paths of contact--the channels that end separation and lead to connection--one can eventually expand and systematize connections worldwide. Rapidly expanding computer networking, aided by satellite and fiber-optic land links--all at steadily declining cost--can convert personal interactions across borders into political democratization.

That, too, was Ithiel de Sola Pool’s dream as he spoke of the technologies of freedom, the driving force for converting degrees of separation into an interactive, small world.