George Merkel Ph.D.

George Merkel, PhD nuclear physicist, passed away peacefully in his sleep on the morning of March 27, 2024 at Paul Spring Retirement Community in Alexandria, VA. He was 94 years old. George is survived by his son, Professor William George "Bill" Merkel, daughter-in-law Gayle Goudy, PhD, and his grandchildren Clara May Goudy Merkel (age 11) and William "Willo" Goudy Merkel (age 10), all of Charleston, South Carolina. He was predeceased by his wife Nancy Sabin Merkel (nee Winter) of more than 50 years in 2015.

George was born in San Francisco to sailor/dockworker Willi Merkel and skilled seamstress Martha Merkel, both German emigrees, in 1929. He spent his early childhood years in the Butcher Town section of San Francisco with an extended stay in Germany, before moving to the Sunset section of San Francisco in 1940 where his parents were able to buy a home. His boyhood interests included radio, electronics, and railroads. As a child, he worked summers picking fruit in the Central Valley, often under the auspices of alleged summer camps that taught socialist solidarity but did not necessarily pay child laborers. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco (1943-1947), where he played on the soccer team and ran track. He won a scholarship to Cal Tech, where he studied with Noble Prize winners including Carl Anderson and Linus Pauling, graduating with a BS in physics 1951. During his high school and college years, he kept himself afloat by working for the Post Office and enrolling in the Naval Reserves, but he was not called up to service in the Korean War because the Department of Defense valued his scientific prospects more highly than his handiness at sea. After Cal Tech, he moved on to graduate work in nuclear physics at the University of California Berkeley and the newly established University of California Radiation Laboratory, now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he performed experiments in radiation under Earnest Lawrence, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi, leading to his PhD thesis "Energy and Angular Distributions of (a, a') and (d, a) Reactions" completed in 1961 and linked here qt4n90c99b.pdf (escholarship.org).

At Berkeley, he met Nancy Winter of Vermillion, South Dakota, a graduate student in bio-chemistry. The two were married at the Unitarian Chapel on the Berkeley campus in 1959. He continued to work at the California Radiation Laboratory until 1963, when he and Nancy moved to upstate New York, where George held a post-doctoral position at the University of Rochester. The couple moved back to California in 1964, where George worked on fission, fusion, propulsion, space flight, and weapons systems projects with the General Atomics Corporation in San Diego. George and Nancy's only child, William, was born in San Diego in 1965. When General Atomics was acquired by Gulf Oil in 1967, George and his family moved to the Washington, DC area, where George worked at Office of Naval Research for a year and then as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army for the bulk of his career, holding a secret security clearance. His work with the Army was highlighted by underground testing in New Mexico and operating the Army's now decommissioned particle accelerators at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and later at Adelphi, Maryland, where George worked at Harry Diamond Labs, now Army Research Labs. While pursuing his work in nuclear physics, he found time to qualify as an E.E. and earn an M.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering from George Washington University by taking night school courses. He published dozens of scientific papers on subjects including particle physics, wave mechanics, bremsstrahlung, and small reactors. He retired in 2011, having worked during every decade from the 1930s when he was a strawberry picker through the 2010s when he was a PhD nuclear physicist whose particle accelerator had been melted down.
Throughout his long career George Merkel remained a passionate student of science and of society. His interests included classical music, history, and political theory as well as mathematics, computing, and scientific disciplines at further remove from physics and engineering. He held an intense dislike of hereditary aristocracy and mindless bureaucracy anchored in his working-class Prussian roots. Deep immersion in the military-industrial-complex fostered an abiding sense of cynicism and resignation regarding the economic and political parameters bounding big science, but never undermined his faith in scientific progress, or his search for practical applications of nuclear energy, such as waste treatment and alternatives to fossil fuels. During his later years, George's life focused on devotion to Nancy, who after a long career at NIH declined gradually over two decades with early onset dementia. As he approached 80, George would rise early to take his wife to day care in a 35 year-old VW beetle, drive half way round the Capital Beltway to work in Adelphi, and return at dusk to bring his wife home to Springfield and do his best to make dinner for two very long term companions. After Nancy went into full-time care and with her passing in 2015, George became a devoted grandfather to Clara, born in 2012, and William "Willo" born in 2014. In due course, George himself went into full-time care at Paul Spring in Alexandria, where he made many new friends and endeavored to teach staff members German, instruct them regarding the delights of San Francisco, and occasionally set out accounts of the history of science. In his 90s George had good days and bad, but suffered from his own memory loss and failing strength. After falling on his head in March, George was hospitalized in Alexandria. This one time, he did not make a surprising recovery. I saw him last five days before he died, when he said to me "mir ist kalt," and I gave him a blanket. The next day he rallied a final time, and explained to hospital staff the workings of particle accelerators, in particular the cyclotron at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. He then informed them he wished to go home, and was discharged to Paul Spring. He did not speak again, and slipped away three days later.

George was buried next to Nancy at a private ceremony at Fairfax Memorial Garden on April 12. All who knew him are invited to a memorial and celebration of life at Paul Spring Retirement Community, 7116 Fort Hunt Road, Alexandria, Virginia on Saturday, May 11, from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. His family would be delighted by your company, and reflections on his scientific work that neither his son nor grandchildren (at least not now) are quite able to grasp.