Things Fall Apart has helped me learn some interesting characteristics of Ibo society, such as how their economy works, what kinds of human characteristics are valuable to them, and the kinds of food that they eat. Things Fall Apart show many interactions between families and friends. Often in these meetings, there are negotiations and ritual greetings. When someone walks into your house, that person often comes with, "a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk" (Achebe 6). In Ibo, the people pride themselves on being more civilized, where as other neighboring villages, "haggle and bargain [for a wife] as if they were buying a goat or a cow in the market" (73). When Ibo men are negotiating, they often use sticks, representative of a certain amount of cowries. Many of the Ibo people are able to climb the social ladder by having more wives and yams. In the Ibo society, social hierarchy is not based as much on how many cowries you have, but how successful you were in the past years' harvests. The Ibo people strongly value hard work, because it often means making more money when planting and harvest come around. They also value a person who is strict, but not ruthless, and someone who has respect for one's elders. The Ibo people have an interesting negotiation format and eat and dress very differently than modern Americans, yet we have very similar moral values.
Gian Giudice, a theoretical physicist, delivered a very interesting talk about the seemingly precarious situation that our entire universe is in. I first heard about the Higgs boson particle, I knew that it was a huge leap in theoretical physics, but I had no idea what kind of effect it would have on the way that we look at the universe. The Higgs boson particle was observed in the particle accelerator when scientists collided protons. This particle seems to prove that the Higgs field, a big cloud of undetectable, omnipresent energy that gives matter its mass. All of this wouldn't be very interesting, except for how closely it relates to our lives. The Higgs field has a consistent density that makes particles have just the right mass, but also allows them to have such a mass, that they can actually stay together. Giudice explained that, if the field had a density only double what it is, the only possible element would be Hydrogen, and we would not exist. Another phenomenon that you need to understand, is the Ultra-dense Higgs field. This field is like the normal Higgs field's evil twin, billions of times denser than the normal field. This field, because of something called Quantum Tunneling, can basically jump around throughout the universe. Giudice explained it like a bubble in boiling water, it appears, almost out of nowhere and grows until it reaches the surface. In a similar way, the ultra-dense field pops up in any place in the universe and expands at light speed until it, again, pops into a new place in the universe. The issue with this is that if it popped up next to earth, we would be destroyed completely and all of the atoms in it's grasp would dissociate and be destroyed, but the likelihood is very low. As Guidice put it, our universe is like a group of campers that pitched their tent on the edge of the cliff, and its on loose dirt. He revealed that we really have nothing to worry about, because we would be long gone before there is even a small chance of it coming to us. In all, the talk was very interesting, and Guidice proved his absolute genius, while keeping a sense of humor alive.
