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Cutting the Gordian Knot

ralphmerkle.com · 379 words · saved by 1 readers

Not all remembrances of him are so kind. One associate calls Merkle "a bull in a china shop." Concedes Hadley, "He wasn't interested in untying the Gordian knot. He cut it." In fact, Merkle's impatience was legendary. Testifying before Congress on spaceships of the future, Merkle dubbed a nuclear rocket then under development at the rival Los Alamos lab "Old Pokey." He said he wanted to explore the cosmos in a near-light-speed, ion-propelled rocket. The Pluto project helped steer Merkle's dream of the stars back down to Earth. Still, he remained impatient. Engineer Blake Myers vividly recalls Merkle driving his old and "totally ripped" Packard convertible at high speed through the lab's parking lot. Some colleagues attributed Merkle's hard-driving personality to the strain of trying to raise three kids on a teaching assistant's salary. Merkle himself boasted that, while a graduate student at Berkeley in the early 1950s, he was often reduced to feeding his family horsemeat. While direct

Cutting the Gordian Knot Cutting the Gordian Knot This is the sidebar to the article on Project Pluto from Air & Space Magazine Ted Merkle As the technical director of Project Pluto at the Livermore lab, Ted Merkle was "a strong wind blowing through the place," says colleague Jim Hadley. To Richard Werner, in charge of developing the base plates for the Tory reactor, Merkle was "a perfect combination of physicist and pitchman -- always running around and shaking things up." Not all remembrances of him are so kind. One associate calls Merkle "a bull in a china shop." Concedes Hadley, "He wasn't

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