(2) Numerical imagination in the sciences does not take on these delirious forms; it has the advantage of resting on an objective basis: it is the substitute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, become chilled, covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms: it foresees a distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors that protect it, will perish of cold. The hypotheses of physics and chemistry in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the speculations of the Hindoo imagination. "Physicists have determined the volume of a molecule, and referring to the numbers that they give, we find that a cube, a millimeter each way (scarcely the volume of a silkworm's egg), would contain a number of molecules at least equal to the cube of 10,000,000--i.e., unity followed by twenty-one zeros. One scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than 250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which speaks off-hand of periods of a hundred thousand years; and many other scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the numerical imagination.