George Spagna: Contemplating the Universe and God

by Charles McGuigan 08.1996

George F Spagna, Jr., has been turning his eyes toward the heavens, in more ways than one, since he was a boy. As an astrophysicist he daily glimpses the wonders of the universe, made manifest in blackholes and quasars, planets and stars, asteroids and comets. But this scientist is also a firm believer in something he cannot see, nor detect with instrumentation.

His office is on the second floor of the Copley Science Building at Randolph-Macon College. It’s a large cinder block room with three desks and computer terminals, book-lined shelves that run floor-to-dropped ceiling, a short-napped wall-to-wall carpet of varying greys. There are the diplomas you would expect–advanced degrees in physics. And right above a chair there’s a framed certificate from the University of the South’s School of Theology. 

“From the time I was in eighth grade I knew I was going to be a physicist or a priest,” says George Spagna. His voice is deep, full, rich; his language precise. He is trim with red hair and beard against pale skin. There is something boyish in the demeanor of this man who chose science as his vocation, but religious studies is still an avocation and he is a Eucharistic minister at his church. 

“I don’t find a conflict with my personal beliefs and physics,” George explains. “I believe the Old and New Testaments are the faithful retelling of a history of a people, and that something tremendous was going on. When I was a fundamentalist I used to believe that if religious truths were contradicted by science something was wrong. Now I know that beliefs don’t hold up if they’re not challenged.”

Using Models to Simplify the Complex

Science itself is the continuous challenging of theories. “We, of course, use models,” says George. “We can’t hope to understand the universe in its infinite complexity, so we simplify it with models. You’re always working with these models, testing them over and over, taking them to the limit.”

It is through this testing of models that astrophysicists continue to strengthen, or weaken, theories. The steady-state theory of the formation of the universe, for instance, a mainstay in the 1950’s, has been disproved. The most widely accepted cosmological theory these days is the big-bang, which maintains a violent explosion of a point, or a singularity, led to the formation of elementary particles, hydrogen and helium, and everything else in the universe. 

Physicists today continue to challenge this theory, looking for a flaw in it. So far, according to George, it holds up to scrutiny.

What continues to baffle astrophysicists is gravity, the weakest of all the forces. The other three forces in the universe–the strong force and the weak force, both nuclear; and electromagnetism–can all be unified in the quantum theory. But gravity is another story. We can see the consequence of gravity in the way objects attract one another. When a boy jumps off the lowest limb of a tree, he is drawn to the Earth, and, though infinitesimally, the Earth is drawn to him. Yet no one understands why.

“It is still a mystery,” says George. “It’s the weakest force, but it dominates the universe on a large scale.” He is quiet for a time, reflecting on the enormity of what he has just said. He adjusts his glasses, rubs his chin.

“I peck around at the edges,” he says. “Once or twice in your life as a scientist you have an Ah Ha experience. For that short time you are the only person in the world who knows this something.” For George Spagna it happened with one of his greatest interests in astrophysics–star formation. “I was looking at my computations on radiation transport and I was trying to see if there was something that would tell me if I was looking at discs or at spheres.” It is believed that clouds of dust within nebulae flatten out into discs and begin rotating and by the by form stars and planets. They are, in effect, star incubators. 

“The radiation transport problems are more complex for discs than for orbs,” says George “There’s a difference between the shadows discs cast and what energy they give off. What I was trying to come up with was an observational signature for discs.” Sure enough, he came up with the signature. And then he tested it. Within a region of space known for star formation he identified 1,400 objects that bore this signature.

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs), the ones that supposedly enter our stratosphere and bear aliens to Earth, have never stood up to scientific scrutiny.

“I would be very surprised if we were the only intelligent life as we know it in the universe,” says Spagna. “I would also be surprised if we had been visited.”

He talks about stratosphere balloons over the Black Hills of South Dakota that were mistaken decades ago for flying saucers. He mentions how the entire Pacific fleet during World War II had its guns trained on Venus rising. They mistook it and its reflections for enemy spacecraft, terrestrial in origin–in this case, Japanese.

“And ten to twenty times a year comets or meteors a few hundred yards wide hit the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporize,” he says. “It looks like a ten to twenty megaton charge. These are the sorts of things mistaken for extraterrestrial aircraft.”

George understands the human need to create these myths about natural phenomena. “If you don’t understand something you tend to ascribe it to the thing you understand least,” he says.

None of this, though, rules out the very real possibility that life exists elsewhere in the universe. George mentions one of  a number of projects devoted to the search for extraterrestrial life. “They have fourteen unexplained radio signals, but the signals haven’t been replicated,” he says. “But a diligent search of the radio spectrum may uncover the existence of life elsewhere.”

Discovery of this sort would have tremendous implications for humanity. “The religious repercussions would be obvious,” he says. Fundamentalists would probably have the hardest time accepting this, as some believe that we are made in God’s physical image.

“What does it mean to be made in God’s image?” asks George. “That probably applies to our spirits, our souls.” And if that’s the case, then the temporal body is nothing more than a convenient shell and the universe may contain many different races of creatures, different in appearance, yet all made in God’s likeness.

Galaxies are definitely populated with molecular clouds that contain gas and dust, silica and graphite and other cosmic debris. These nebulae cool like massive hot air balloons. And once they reach a certain mass, self-gravitation causes the components to free fall into a center until the entire mass ignites. “It’s nuclear ignition,” George says. And that’s the way stars are born. “They then evolve, go through structural changes,” George explains. “For instance, our own Sun will one day become a red giant and eventually, toward the end of its life, a white dwarf.”

Stars, their formation and evolution, has been George’s central focus in astrophysics for some time now. But he admits that his curiosity is piqued by virtually everything in the universe. “I don’t know if there’s one single astronomical phenomenon that doesn’t interest me,” he says.

He briefly removes his glasses, guides them back up the bridge of his nose. “When I was a kid I was fascinated by rocketry and space travel and the notion of an artificial satellite,” he says. 

Born at the dawn of the Space Age, George remembers when Sputnik was launched. “And, of course, I remember Apollo 11,” he says. “As I got older, planetary astronomy fascinated me. I read a lot of books, science and science fiction. I’m somewhat enamored of books as you can see,” he adds, gesturing toward a wall of book-lined shelves. “Now, as I said, I’m primarily interested in star formation. That and radiation transport.” A fundamental problem for astronomers of all times has been conducting experiments. You can’t simply reach an elongated arm into the heart of a distant star and bring it home to perform experiments on it in a laboratory. “What we know of stars is from radiation transport,” says George. “I capture and interrogate photons. Analysis of electromagnetic radiation is all we ever get. We can determine the direction it travels from, the energy level, distribution of energy at the source. But that’s all. It’s very humbling. It is planar observation of a three-dimensional space.”

From Telescope to Computer

“Primarily,” continues George, “I’m a theorist, not an observer.” Even though he is director of Keeble Observatory, he spends little time looking out at the observable universe through an eyepiece. He does his work on computers and within the solitude of his own skull where he formulates theories or creates methods for challenging those already widely accepted. But the majority of his time these days is spent either teaching or in administering his other academic duties. As well as heading up the observatory. George is also faculty representative to the president’s cabinet and chairman of the physics department. Recently, he also agreed to coordinate Randolph-Macon’s interdisciplinary studies program. “I’m less of a contributing scientist than a teacher,” says George. “But I have to keep current in order to justify my teaching. And I really do enjoy the teaching. There’s something very gratifying in having a student come back after a couple of years to thank me for teaching.”

He remembers that he was finishing up his doctoral thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, his thesis advisor wanted him to do post-doctorate work. “But I told him I was too old, that I’ve put my family through too many years of school,” George says.

So he settled in at Randolph-Macon College and created quite a physics department there which now offers a minor in astrophysics. But there’s something lacking in college education today, according to George.

“I would like to send out a plea for the return of the Renaissance man or woman,” he says. “Things have become too departmentalized, too focused. It’s all made dry and technical. I have argued that there is a need to sciencize the humanists, not to humanize the scientists. I’ve gone to more symphonic performances than humanists have been to physics lectures. Science somehow got demonized. It became a necessary evil in some minds. People weren’t interested in the science. All they wanted was a technological fix.”

When people tell George they’re no good in science or math, he looks shocked, amazed and then says, “And they’re going to let you vote?”
People everywhere need to learn enough so they can make their own decisions,” he says. “So-called authorities sometimes twist science to make it work for their cause. People need to understand the basics of science.”

He pauses for a moment and then mentions Albert Einstein. “He challenged the paradigms, while maintaining his integrity,” says George, genuinely in awe. “As amazing as he was, he could never buy quantum mechanics. The volume of what he published about Brownian motion, photoelectric effect and electrodynamics in 1905, would have been a career. He was , in so many ways, the first modern physicist, but also the last of the classical physicists.”

He weaves the fingers of his hands together, slowly, thoughtfully. “If I could do one thing in my life,” says George Spagna, “I would like to describe the universe as a single entity.”