We’re All in the Network of Time
The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs.
Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images.
It’s a collage millions of pictures deep – every actor you’ve seen on screen, every politician you’ve seen in the news, almost everyone you’ve seen in a history textbook.
Network Of Time is the world’s first interactive snapshot of this network.
For instance, LeBron James can be linked to Joseph Stalin in just five photographs.
James appears in a photo with Canadian broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos, who was photographed with former Canadian PM Jean Chrétien. Chrétien was in a photo with Queen Elizabeth II, who appeared in a photo with Winston Churchill, and Churchill was photographed with Stalin.
The Network of Time is conceptually adjacent to the Great Span.
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You can save a step by just finding a picture of LeBron with any knighted British athlete (or Elton John of course). This one was fun.
LeBron James -> Lewis Hamilton -> Queen Elizabeth II -> King George V -> Tsar Nicholas II -> Anastasia
My thoughts exactly. Any famous athlete is likely to have had a pic taken with a president, who would have had a pic taken with E II
A fun fact about social networks is that they tend to have a small number of super-connected nodes that make these sorts of short-path connections possible. Celebrities and politicians are well-connected in this sense. In the LeBron -> Stalin example, I'm going to guess that Queen Elizabeth II has been photographed with an insane number of people.
There are other networks that have this same ("scale free") shape. Web pages on the pre-Facebook internet. Even the chemical pathways in biology: the chemical reactions needed by living things. The most-connected (i.e. important) chemical? Water.
There are online tools to calculate Bacon Number and Erdős number
Wikipedia:
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Erdős number
I kinda sorta have a Bacon Number of 2.
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