Where the atomic nuclei are: Maurice Sendak, physics illustrator

By Ryan Dahn , a historian of science and Senior Associate Editor at Physics Today. This article first appeared in Physics Today online in August 2024 and in print in the November 2024 issue of Physics Today.

Well before Maurice Sendak became famous for Where the Wild Things Are, he was an 18-year-old high school senior in Brooklyn, New York, looking for his first paying art gig. Already known at his school as a talented artist, Sendak was asked in 1946 by his physics teacher, Hyman Ruchlis , to illustrate a popular-science book titled Atomics for the Millions . In the book, Ruchlis and coauthor Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff, a professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City and veteran of the Manhattan Project, aimed to demystify nuclear science for laypeople in the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Sendak agreed to do the work for 1% of the royalties , of which he received an advance of $100, about $1600 today. He also negotiated a title-page credit as the book’s illustrator—added to the contract in a handwritten addendum at the last minute—and, allegedly , a promise from Ruchlis that he’d receive a passing grade in his physics class. Published in 1947, Atomics for the Millions was Sendak’s first credited work, and copies are now sought by collectors.

A perfectionist, Sendak apparently expressed disappointment later in life with his illustrations for the book. But one can clearly see inklings of the artist’s budding talent in the whimsical drawings, cartoons, and diagrams he created. Along with elucidating concepts from atomic physics, the art also supported the broader claim made by Ruchlis and Eidinoff in the book: With the atomic genie out of the bottle, humanity needed to choose between a peaceful future fueled by nuclear energy and a devastating nuclear war.

In many of his drawings, Sendak anthropomorphizes atoms, molecules, and subatomic particles to convey the otherwise esoteric details of nuclear science. Here, he shows sodium atoms, taking the form of young women reminiscent of 1940s bobby-soxers, and chlorine atoms, represented by strapping young men, meeting on the “chemical dance floor” and forming sodium chloride molecules.

Illustration from NBLA copy of Atomics for the Millions .

Sendak illustrates radioactive half-life by using radium. He shows the element’s atoms holding hands in the top row. After its half-life of 1590 years has passed, half the radium atoms remain, on average; after 3180 years, only a quarter of the atoms are intact. Sendak’s use of the word “suicide” in his caption is striking: The artist struggled with depression throughout his life and was open about having had suicidal thoughts.

No popular-science book about 20th-century physics would be complete without a discussion of Albert Einstein and E = mc². In their “Modern Alchemy” chapter, the authors explain the process of nuclear transmutation, the transformation of one element into another through radioactive decay or other nuclear reactions, by analogizing it to alchemy in the Middle Ages. Sendak’s illustration shows Einstein, deep in thought, pondering a balance—an alchemist’s tool—whose two arms are equally loaded with matter and energy.

Long before the days of email, chain letters asking recipients to pass along a message to several others arrived in one’s physical mailbox. The authors use that common experience to explain chain reactions in nuclear reactors. In Sendak’s image, a chain letter begins multiplying and quickly buries a harried postal worker under a deluge of mail.

During the early atomic age, nuclear utopianism met US automobile culture in the form of the hypothetical nuclear-powered car : a vehicle that one could drive thousands of miles without refueling. Authors Ruchlis and Eidinoff pour cold water on that idea by arguing that reactors would never be small enough to power a personal vehicle. Sendak’s illustration captures the absurdity of the concept.

Sendak’s drawing for a chapter dedicated to the medical applications of synthetic isotopes echoes World War II–era military imagery. Medical practitioners attack a mangy dog labeled “disease” with what appear to be a neutron machine gun, a radium-tipped bayonet, an x-ray bludgeon, and isotope tommy guns.

Sendak’s final illustration in the book makes vividly apparent the binary choice between nuclear utopia and nuclear oblivion that the authors believed humanity was facing. Some might argue that the drawing lacks nuance, but one could say the same of the authors’ characterization of the future of the atomic era.

The illustrations are scanned from a copy of Atomics for the Millions that is held at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives in College Park, Maryland. The library is part of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today. The book, which was published in 1947 by the Whittlesey House imprint of McGraw-Hill, is in the public domain.