# How and when did "the atom" become an icon for science?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [February 26, 2003, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600 "2003-02-26T08:32:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 19
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/1 "2003-02-26T08:32:31Z")
Think about it…in popular culture, whenever someone wants to represent “science” - there’s usually a little picture of an atom with the electrons looping around the nucleus.
Why is this? Who decided that this should be the symbol for “science” ? There are so many things that could have been chosen (microscope, test tubes, slide rule, computer, light bulb…
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### Author:  [@Tom\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_P)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 9:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/2 "2003-02-26T09:24:45Z")
My WAG is that it first appeared in the 1950’s or 1960’s, together with the whole _atomic age_-thing. As to why, I guess it is because the picture of the atom is very recognizable and simple to draw.
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### Author:  [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/3 "2003-02-26T13:06:23Z")
Because he has a much cooler uniform than, say, Hawkman.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/4 "2003-02-26T13:38:56Z")
I suspect it was earlier than the 1950s. The advent of the atomic bomb probably gave it a big boost in the late 1940s, but I’ll bet you could find examples in science fiction art earlier than that. Popularization of the Bohr Atom was coincident with its developement in physics. You can’t understand stories like “The Girl in the Golden Atom” without knowing about it.
What kills me about the popular image of the atom (as seen in, say **Jimmy Neutron** , is that even in Bohr theory, the atom doesn’t look like that, with three or so well-defined orbital planes. Since the orbit could take any orientation, the orbitals even then were visualized as “shells”, unless the rotation were “stopped” to show orbital distances. With the rise of the “new” quantum theory and Schroedinger’s equation, of course, that all went out the window, and you had orbitals of probability density that took on increasingly odd shapes. Maybe the problem is that these didn’t work well as graphics, not instantly conveying the sense. Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant can draw a few Jimmy Neutron atoms coming out of a crack in Three Mile Island and yopu know what he’s saying. If he put p- or d-orbits in there it’d look like a bad Monster Movie. And, as one of my profs pointed out, some hybrid orbitals look downright obscene.
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### Author:  [@rsa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsa)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/5 "2003-02-26T15:22:21Z")
I suspect a lot of it has to do with the history of science. Why use a light bulb invented in the 1800’s when the idea of _atomos_ goes back 2500 years (and even before). The atom represents the earliest basic science. The other examples you gave are just various applied sciences.
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### Author:  [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/6 "2003-02-26T15:43:25Z")
I think that, nowadays, DNA is becoming the icon of choice.
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### Author:  [@stolichnaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stolichnaya)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/7 "2003-02-26T16:31:55Z")
Yeah, the “orbital” atom now brings to mind kitsch and nostalgia.
As **CalMeacham** points out, it isn’t even accurate, and I would guess that would prompt some objection from any actual science-types reviewing prospective designs.
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### Author:  [@Padeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Padeye)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/8 "2003-02-26T16:34:46Z")
Curious you’d refer to a “Jimmy Neutron atom” being drawn on a Three Mile Island cartoon when the event was a couple of decades before the cartoon.
The navy uses a Bohr style atom as an insignia for electronics technicians. It has two electron orbits with five pointed stars to represent the electrons and four dots in the nucleus. The odd thing was I always heard it referred to it as a Lithium atom.
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### Author:  [@Padeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Padeye)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/9 "2003-02-26T16:36:23Z")
FWIW [http://store6.yimg.com/I/militarybest\_1727\_99906546](http://store6.yimg.com/I/militarybest_1727_99906546)
A metal pin for a cap that shows the insignia more clearly than an embroidered patch would.
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### Author:  [@Merseybeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merseybeat)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/10 "2003-02-26T17:00:36Z")
The Atomium is an amazing building in Brussels, used as the symbol of the 1958 World’s Fair.
[http://www.atomium.be/](http://www.atomium.be/)
It’s still a major feature of the city today.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/11 "2003-02-26T18:48:58Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Curious you’d refer to a “Jimmy Neutron atom” being drawn on a Three Mile Island cartoon when the event was a couple of decades before the cartoon.
I did that as a contemporary reference. What would _you_ call it?
The best comment on this use of the “atom” symbol I’ve seen is in the Graphic Novel **Watchmen**. The costume designers associated with the US Government want Dr. Manhattan to wear a helmet with a “Jimmy Neutron” atom on it.
Dr. Manhattan: What’s this?
Designer: You know, it’s an atom – atomic power, all that…
Dr. Manhattan: I do not think I will be wearing this. If I wear a symbol, it will be something I respect.
He then draws a dot on his forehead, surrounding it with a circle, with a dot on that circle representing the electron. It’s a schematic hydrogen atom.
Dr. Manhattan: There
Designer: (rubbing chin) You know, I think that might work.
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### Author:  [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/12 "2003-02-26T21:20:15Z")
According to Spencer Weart in _Nuclear Fear: A History of Images_ (Harvard, 1988, p404-6), a very good study of just this sort of thing, the “ringed atom was by far the most common of all pictorial images found in nuclear energy representations from the 1920s on.” Having discussed how it derives from the Bohr model, even though this was already falling out of use amongst scientists in the 1920s, he goes on:
> [@](#):
>
> Nevertheless, journalists and even scientists persisted in using the solar-system picture. Cut off from real physics, the ringed atom evolved in a remarkable way. Bohr’s original model had not been symmetrical; the elliptic orbits were skewed off to one side. Yet scientists and popularizers began to draw symmetrical pictures, and most often with a fourfold symmetry, which had little scientific justification. After 1945 representations of the atom were almost always symmetrical, and some designers went on to enclose the whole thing in a circle. The definitive version was promulgated by the Atomic Energy Commision on its official seal, commissioned from an artist [Americo Favale] in the Post Office Department. After laboring on the project for months he submitted a number of designs, and the Commission chose a ringed atom with four ellipses around a central nucleus, the whole enclosed in a circle. “I consulted some of our scientists,” the artist later recalled, and “they told me that the design … did not mean anything. It is only symbolic.”
Weart goes on the suggest rather Jungian interpretations of it.
A technical quibble about the above is perhaps in order. The _original_ Bohr model was that published in _The Philosophical Journal_ in July 1913 and it is entirely symmetrical with circular orbits. It’s not until September 1914 that he suggested using elliptical orbits, in an attempt to explain the fine structure. These attempts, into the 1920s, became rather baroque, so representing the orbits all off to one side was just for clarity in diagrams.
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### Author:  [@Padeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Padeye)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/13 "2003-02-26T21:29:24Z")
Oh, if it’s been in a graphic novel then I withdraw my objection. 😃 Seriously, where is there a clear picture of the Jimmy Neutron atom? I looked on IMDB and couldn’t find a picture with a clear image of it.
At any rate I take the navy electronics tech atom symbol to be Helium which makes it inappropriate for electronics.
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### Author:  [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/14 "2003-02-26T21:38:08Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by stolichnaya \*
> \*\*Yeah, the “orbital” atom now brings to mind kitsch and nostalgia.
> \*\*
There ought to be a term that describes the nostalgia for a past vision of a future that would never come-to-be. (Does that make sense?)
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### Author:  [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2003, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/15 "2003-02-26T23:24:34Z")
How about “[The Gernsback Continuum](http://hex.forestnet.org/files/cyberpunk/gibson/the_gernsback_continuum.html)” ?
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### Author:  [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2003, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/16 "2003-02-27T00:41:13Z")
Retro Future.
All during 1999 there was a website titled Retro Future, and its updates were a weekly feature on AOL. It revisited all the stuff from the mid-20th century (from the 1930s to the 1960s) that was imagined to be in our “future”. Which is now. So where are the flying cars, dammit?
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### Author:  [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2003, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/17 "2003-02-27T01:51:06Z")
“The Way the Future Was”
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### Author:  [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2003, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/18 "2003-02-27T03:31:09Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Terminus Est \*
> \*\*There ought to be a term that describes the nostalgia for a past vision of a future that would never come-to-be. (Does that make sense?) \*\*
Hmm…perhaps for that you’d have to use the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional tense from Douglas Adams’ [Restaurant at the end of the Universe](http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html)
Thanks for all the answers folks…some very plausible theories in there.
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### Author:  [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2003, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-and-when-did-the-atom-become-an-icon-for-science/157600/19 "2003-02-27T05:21:15Z")
Jomo Mojo writes:
\> Retro Future
And that term has been around since at least the mid-'80’s. I used the term “retro-future” in this film review:
[http://www.dcfilmsociety.org/rv\_fifth.htm](http://www.dcfilmsociety.org/rv_fifth.htm)
I recall using the term in conversation back in the mid-80’s.