On “How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer”

Elliot recommended the documentary “How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer” to anyone wishing to understand networks and how they functioned.

I watched it and was pretty astounded. I love documentaries particularly ones on space, human biology and wildlife. I am currently working through Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”.

“How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer” starts off with trying to establish the “6 degrees of separation” theory as plausible or and urban myth. However it goes from exploring the connection of people through networks to making discoveries about how so many things like the spread of diseases, sexual activity, communications and genetic material all follow patterns along networks of their connections and interactions.

I’m struggling to articulate the research undertaken in the documentary but it all made sense and is so worth a watch. Essentially, all the different types of networks explored in the doco acted in a similar way, suggesting that they all adhere to the same mathematical calculations. And if those calculations are worked out, if the behavior of networks can be predicted, there are boundless possibilities of the good that could come of it.

Fascinating stuff.