The most fascinating areas of science, where the most unusual things are observed, is at the extremes - in the world of the very small, at the level of the atom, and the world of the very large, where we measure and observe the universe itself. "Brigg's elevator" gives us the orders of magnitude of the range of phenomena we can investigate in science. Ground floor is our everyday world, (this room for example), set at level 0, which is 100 ( i.e. 1). From the lowest level, the so called "superstrings" at 10 -35 we go up through quarks at 10-20 and on up to the whole universe at 10 26, which takes us as far up as we can go. It's quite a trip as you will see in the diagram! Let's stay up at the top for a while and take a look at the big picture - cosmology -the study of the origin and development of the Universe as a whole.

In Old Testament days, as today, the night sky, speckled with the dust of twinkling stars challenged, intrigued, and defied adequate description. The appeal in Isaiah 40 verse 26 is to do what good scientists are supposed to do - to observe! "lift up your eyes on high, and see WHO has created these stars." Today we have many aids to help us follow this call, to observe the heavens. The new view that the Hubble telescope, and the COBE satellite, have uncovered, allows us to understand the cosmos in a way undreamed of in the past. And the more we observe, the more urgent is the call of Isaiah 40, to consider who created the stars, to appreciate the one who knows their exact number, and who controls them. In the Bible, the Creator is revealed as one who independent of any other being brought time and space into existence, and the one who says Is. 40 vs 26 'controls the stars'.

Because with the naked eye, even on a clear night, we can only see a few thousand stars, it's hard to really appreciate the magnitude and magnificence of the universe that surrounds us. The largest clusters of stars are called galaxies. But the heavens contain not just clusters of stars, but clusters of galaxies! To the unaided eye, even galaxies look like faint blurs in the night sky. But the best telescopes show us that a typical galaxy contains at least a 100,000 million stars, and is some 100,000 light years wide - (a light year is the distance light travels in a year!)

There may be more than a million, million, galaxies, spread thinly throughout the universe. A quick calculation gives us an estimate of the number that Isaiah. 40 v.26 didn't include - at least a hundred thousand, million, million! Or over 20 million, million stars, for every person on earth. Our earth is tucked away amongst some 100,000 million stars, in a rather small galaxy, the Milky Way. 'A quiet galactic suburb!' Our sun lies in one of the arms of the Milky Way galaxy, about a third of the way from the edge. If you took off in the Concord and flew at cruising speed towards the centre of the Milky Way, it would take you some 17 thousand million years to get there! Just about the optimum location for life, to give the right steller density, and low radiation emissions.

And these days we are finding new clusters of distant galaxies, in an expanding Universe.. In 1989, astronomers found a structure they dubbed the "Great Wall." It's a collection of galaxies - 500 million light years long, 200 million light years wide, and 15 million light years thick!

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