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THE WINNERS OF the Irish Film and Television Academy awards were announced last night at the Mansion House.
The big winners were Room with seven wins, and Liam Neeson, who took home the outstanding achievement award.
You can watch the awards on TV tonight – they’ll be on TV3 at 9pm.
As usual, all the craic was on the red carpet…
Spit on us, Liam.
Anyone? ANY ONE?
Still rocking the daffodil too, what a guy.
He’s only SIXTEEN.
She also won for her role in Penny Dreadful, for Best Actress in a drama.
Glam.
… and pulled it out of the bag!
Here she is with her fella, aka James Potter.
They coordinated that little leg stance, didn’t they?
Written by Nicola Byrne and posted on DailyEdge.ie
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The immensity of space truly boggles the mind.
So that’s where the Gardaí are when you need them…
Why hello there….
Touche sir.
The way they can define distance in light years, and then tell us how far backward a universe is…thats mind boggling. And amazing at the same time. The NASA website is good for live feeds every now and again. Puts us into perspective, and yet you get some amazing images.
Time is merely a construct of the human mind.
True, but we have to have some measurement, so I’ll go with the one we all currently use. If science discovers another method of measuring I’ll check it out also
I think you’d enjoy Simon Singh’s highly readable book on The Big Bang. He goes into detail about how we know the size of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the speed of light, the distance to our nearest star (other than the Sun), the size of the Galaxy and the size of the Universe. Brilliant book
But can he define time? And quantify it?
Yes. I believe it’s something to do with caesium atoms….electrons… radiation…. BAH, brain, wherefore art thou…. But we can quantify it using atomic clocks that measure changes per second.
John,
Time is more than a construct, it is part of the physical world, it can be measured, bent, speeded up and slowed down. Time is part of the lattice on which our physical reality is draped.
The reason these astronomers are looking back in time when viewing far away galaxies is because light travels at a speed. So when you look at a far away object the light has taken time to get to you.
In the same way when you watch a carpenter hammer a nail from a good distance away, you hear the sound AFTER you see the worker swing the hammer.. This is because sound travels slower than light, so effectively you are Hearing something which has already happened or “hearing back in time”.
THe same principle applies to light but as light traveled so fast, the object being observed has to be very very far away before the effect is significant.
Our closest neighbouring star is 4 light years away. So when you look at it in the night sky you are seeing it as it was 4 years ago. It may have exploded 3 years ago but the light from the explosion hasn’t reached earth yet.
Mad eh!
@john doe
Thanks for proving my point.
John O’Neil..
You may have been joking but you are spot on.. the entire physical world as we perceive it is a construct of the human mind really.
The fact that you perceive something in a particular way as a human, for example the passage of time, does not in any way prove that it exists in reality or as you perceive it.
When you read stuff like this ,really makes you feel insignificant in this vast universe we live in.absolutley amazing
Although if you consider the metals that help make up the human body where created just after the bang, we have some connection to the mysteries of it all.
Most of the metals weren’t made until well after the Big Bang but when stars formed, but I take your point. Stars were needed to make all but one of the metals if I’m correct.
Gold is created in a mere 30 second sequence of the multimillion year lifetime of a star, when it is exploding! So it is believed all gold came from supernovae
I have no problem accepting there was a Big Bang 13 billion years ago but don’t try and tell me before the Big Bang there was nothing. Nothing at all?
That’s where theology enters the equation.
I think time came into existence with the Big Bang as well so there was no time “before the Big Bang”.
Mass warps time & slows it down,The pre big bang singularity possessed all the mass in the universe, effectively bringing time to a standstill.
The problem with a singularity is that we don’t really understand its physics. Spacetime concepts (such as space and time) run into trouble at the scales close to The Big Bang, so we don’t really know.
Our Big Bang was the end of another Universe. The end of our Universe will create life for another way of life. It’s all an endless loop.
I do love these articles. Saying there was something before the big bang you need to get your mind around spacetime. There was no time before the big bang so there was no before. As Susan stated mass warps time. That’s why gps works on a different clock. Times passes slower for us on the surface then in space. Black holes should you find yourself near one and got back out you would find years passed here while minutes passed for you there. So compress all the mass in the universe into a one singularity then there is no time.
Amazing stuff
Perhaps the asking of what came before the Big Bang or pondering the why is just a meaningless question. We can’t even begin to consider what is the meaning of “nothing” or to truly understand these deep cosmological questions, we just don’t have the brain capacity. Think about it, the brain evolved as a tool to survive in the African Savannah environment: outwit predators etc. there was never any evolutionary pressure to understand these big questions. Considering what’s before the Big Bang is just beyond our intellectual capacity; it literally makes my mind hurt anyway when I consider it too long!
Chris, there is also string theory, the idea of multiverse, that universes are constantly dying and being born, like bubbles in a glass of beer, all of this on an atomic scale, the coming together of electrons and protons causes the big bangs and that our “universe” is actually only a minuscule part of the process, making our verse only a quantum mechanic in a bigger scheme, dunno if it’s true but it can allow you to think of a before the Big Bang and about what could happen when our universe burns out.
Yeah I was reading into that, I quite like that theory, although they say it can never be tested by experiment because the vibrating strings are billions of times smaller than anything current instruments can detect
Yep and there was no time either. Get your head around that
13.1 billion light years away now that would be some trip to undertake.
By the time you reach ninety men will discover how if not when to travel it.
Imagine it with the kids ? Are we there yet ? Are we there yet ?
You came back to tell us that Sergeant Yates?
Actually it was created around 13 billion years ago. But space is expanding faster than light so it’s around 70 billion light years away.
Good old blue shift
I’m surprised that something that distant would be blue, if anything I’d expect it redshifted into the infrared, must check paper
Maybe it’s the reflection of our own telescope.
Think about that.
Bit of blue for the dad’s. ..
Nod to Peter Kay…. well done to you!
The vastness of it all, makes religions completely implausible in my opinion.
Except buddhism. Which isn’t really a religion I suppose.
Not only are we all made of stars, but parts of our left arm probably come from different stars than parts of our right arm! Mad thought, but probable
Recycled atoms is a mad thought alright.
…I wasn’t having a go there, it’s reads like I am, I was reading a book a few years ago and it had a chapter about “recycled atoms,” the idea that we could share atoms that were part of the dinosaurs as well as the first ever stars created is mind boggling.
No, I agree with you, it is a cool thought. A couple of nitrogen atoms exhaled by a dinosaur are being inhaled by each of now, statistically in every breath we take. And pretty much all the hydrogen in all our water came about before there were even stars! As well as that, the vast majority of water on Earth appears to be at least a billion years old. The limestone pebbles in my back garden in Galway have coral fossils in them that are around 350million years old. That is deep time, impossible to get my head around.
And add to that, time is relative, it is impossible to get your head around, still it’s nice to wonder.
Yep. Was on valentia island to see the tetrapod footprints. 385 million years old and you can see where its tail dragged through the mud. Trying to contemplate that distance in time boggles the mind.
It votes Yes.
Its not… its not the blue oyster is it?
Have a day off.
Haha ronan gas.
Looks like The Abyss
I’m reasonably sure it isn’t blue but infrared. The further away points are in an expanding universe, the faster they move away from us and the faster they move the more their wavelengths stretch making their light redder. This is called redshifting. It’s basically the same physics principle as the Doppler effect, which makes the note of an approaching ambulance higher and a passing ambulance lower. For light waves, approaching objects get bluer and receding objects get redder.
So those distant objects are probably deep infrared.
Well would you Adam & Eve it…..
PLEASE click on the video below, give yourself a laugh!
Family Guy Creationist http://youtu.be/GVmdCAT7Rc8
If you look carefully at that image, you’ll see John Water’s opinion
It’s funny how were made feel alien to it all when in fact if you take away the ego , we’re ‘it’
If it was red they’d be looking to turn it off…
Too cold?
Not Swedish enough.
What I find most fascinating is that there are so many mysteries in this massive universe that we live in, but even more mysteries in the tiny quantum world. The fact that there are particles that can be in two places at once or be in different states depending on whether they are being observed or not. What is even more mind boggling is that if we are all made of these particles, then why can’t we do the same? This then raises the various multiverse theories and so on.
It’s something that even the great Einstein could not wrap his head around, a theory of everything that reconciled the quantum world with our physical world. For anyone interested, I would really recommend a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, in which he suggests that our consciousness has a direct effect on our physical world.
There is so so much we have left to learn. It really is amazing stuff.
The scales both large and small, truly boggle the mind. how things work at the quantum scale currently and how physics operated at the large scale before our current state (pre-Big Bang or whatever initiated our current laws of physics) are so amazing and incomprehensible that they are infinitely more fantastic than any of the wonders proclaimed in religious dogma.
Puts the importance of whether we let two men marry one another into context. Although if by some amazing natural freak accident of evolution, we are the only multicellular conscious and collaborative beings in the universe, then every collaborative decision we make to shape our society is a precious marvel.
If the earth is 4.54 billion years old, and 1 metre represents 100,000 years, then the history of the earth can be represented by 45.4 km. On this scale, a millennium is 1 cm and a century 1 mm. Going into the future, large life is expected to start dying out in 500 million years, ie. after another 5 km on this scale. So from the perspective of that time in the future, the current millennium will be like a 1 cm slice of time about the 45.4 km mark on the way from start to finish of a 50.4 km stretch. Pretty evident that the universe doesn’t have humans in mind, since it took billions of years for us to arise in the first place, we have only existed in a state of advancement for a tiny slice of time, we inhabit one planet of trillions of trillions in the observable universe etc.
Sorry everyone my phones freaking out
So the galaxy probably doesn’t exist anymore. And if it’s blue shifted, does that mean it’s travelling towards us at a huge speed???
Amazing
I wonder if there’s someone on a planet, in another galaxy looking at us through a telescope…
What really fascinates me is that there is so many mysteries in regards to the universe on such a big scale, but yet even more mysteries in the tiny quantum world. The fact that there are particles that can be in two places at once or be in two states at once depending on whether they are being observed. Even more mind boggling is that if we are made of all of these particles then why can’t we do the same? Which raises the question of multiverses and so on. That is something even the great Einstein could not do, reconcile the quantum world with our own physical world. Amazing stuff!
Did someone mention ‘time’? Does it really exist or does it just exist as a way of measuring and calculating? Before we existed, did dinasoars run around wondering what time it was?
Time itself is an extension of space (space time ). Just because the dinosaurs may not have had a proper conception of what time was doesnt mean it doesn’t actually exist. Look into Brian Greenes stuff on einsteinium idea of general relativity he breaks it down simply and interestingly
So am I correct… that’s 5.8 trillion miles x 13.1 billion.. in distance
The sheer vastness of the universe never ceases to amaze me. I find it rather humbling when thinking about things like this as there is so so much we don’t know, or can even comprehend with our brains.
The thing I find most fascinating though is the quantum world. Like the fact that there are particles that can be in two places at once , or even change their state depending on whether they are being observed or not. Even more mind boggling is that if we are all made of these particle then why can’t we behave in the same way? Which brings in the theory of multiverses and so on. Brilliant stuff!!
It’s the one thing even the great Einstein could not do, reconcile the quantum world with the physical world.
Well this is the proof I needed. God lives there!!!
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