Enlarge

Dr. Scott Acton (’84) remembers the exact moment he knew he would become a physicist.

In the summer of 1976, he was playing with a set of dominoes on the floor at his house in Riverton, Wyoming. His uncle, who was a Methodist minister, began asking him a series of questions.

“What do you think would happen if we pushed these dominoes closer together? Would they fall down faster or slower? What would happen if we spread them further apart?”

Acton and his uncle performed those experiments together.

“Then he said three words that changed my life,” Acton recalled. “He said, ‘That’s physics, Scott.’

“I remember thinking, there’s a job where you get to do this kind of stuff all day long and you get paid for it?” Acton said. “I lived in a tiny town in Wyoming, and I couldn’t see any further than the street I lived on. I had no vision, and just the tiniest little spark was ignited. From then on, when people asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, I said, ‘I’m going to study physics.’ ”

That moment set Acton on a trajectory leading him on a 24-year journey to help develop one of the most significant scientific instruments of our times: the James Webb Space Telescope. As the largest and most complex space observatory ever built, Webb’s unprecedented sensitivity to infrared light is allowing scientists to explore the early universe, the formation of galaxies through time, the life cycle of stars and other worlds outside our solar system.

In early 2022, Acton was among the first to see test images sent back from the telescope after its successful launch.

Though he had an idea what was coming, those images left Acton speechless. He had spent half a lifetime working on the mission, most recently as Webb’s wavefront sensing and controls scientist with Ball Aerospace. But to see it in action went beyond his expectations.

“These images have profoundly changed the way I see the universe,” he said at the time.

On March 11, after a key alignment stage in space, the first diffraction-limited image was taken. The telescope was pointed at a location in Ursa Major, and the image contained 241 distinct galaxies.

On his way home that night, he tweeted to a friend, “We are surrounded by a symphony of creation. There are galaxies everywhere.”

A couple of weeks later, NASA asked him for a quote, “and I thought, ‘Oh, what am I going to say?’ Then I remembered this tweet. I hit copy and paste and sent it to them and it went viral.”

Those early images made him think of Job 38:7, which says during the creation of the universe “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”

“I pictured these galaxies singing, maybe not in any words humans could understand, but the emotion we could definitely understand,” he said. “In my mind I pictured that God was expressing joy that humankind after all this time could finally see the universe.”

Fanning the physics flame

Acton enrolled in Central Wyoming College after high school, not realizing he couldn’t study physics there. He began to search for a university with a physics program. His friend and mentor Stanley Shipp, an ACU chemistry graduate who later became a legendary missionary, told Acton, “I want you to go to Abilene Christian College.”

“I did a little checking around,” Acton said. “It turned out ACC had become ACU, and they had a physics program. I was accepted within the week.”

There he met Drs. Paul Schulze and Mike Sadler. “I wasn’t a very good student,” he said. “You always talk about people graduating magna cum laude and summa cum laude. I graduated ‘thank the laude.’ I remember going through Commencement ceremonies in 1984, sitting there and studying for a final exam in classical mechanics. If I didn’t pass that exam I wouldn’t get my degree. I went later and took that test and didn’t do very well, but Paul Schulze decided to pass me, and Mike Sadler gave me a recommendation for graduate school at Texas Tech University. These guys believed in me.”

While at ACU, he also met his wife, Heidi. They have two children, John, who recently graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and Stacy Gasvoda, who is working on her master’s degree in speech pathology. Stacy’s husband, David, is a lawyer in Kansas City.

Acton first began working full time with telescopes at Keck Observatory in Hawaii. “We were the first big telescope in the world to incorporate something known as adaptive optics,” he said.

After six years, he was ready for a new challenge so he took a job with Ball Aerospace’s technology corporation, which had a contract to work on development of the Webb.

In 2005, he became the wavefront sensing and controls scientist for the project. His job was to put together algorithms, a ground system and a team to align and phase the telescope after launch. In layman’s terms, he was tasked with focusing the telescope – “except usually you adjust a single knob to focus something,” he said, “and we have hundreds of knobs that all have to be focused.”

Trek of a lifetime

A delay in the project in 2016 allowed Acton to embark on a second journey, fulfilling a lifetime dream of riding his bicycle around the world. But even that leg of his life’s journey was not without challenges.

His goal was to spend a year bicycling about 15,000 miles around the globe, giving lectures to communities, schools and colleges along the way. He was cycling about 200 miles a week in preparation for the tour when he started feeling a pain in the center of his chest when he would begin a ride.

“I’m an endurance athlete, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with my heart, right?” he said. “Well, wrong. It turns out the arteries in my heart were clogged beyond anybody’s imagination. So one month before I was going to begin this journey, I had to have an emergency quadruple bypass operation to restore blood flow to my heart and to save my life. I was one cheeseburger away from a coronary.”

His daughter was to get married in three days. “I asked my doctor if I could wait until after the wedding for the surgery,” Acton said. “And he said, ‘Yeah, that way all the family will be in town for the funeral. I attended the wedding by Facetime on my phone.”

After recovering from the bypass, Acton began his bicycle trek by riding north from Boulder, Colorado, to Fairbanks, Alaska. Then he cycled across Europe – through Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary. He returned to Boulder and went south, which took him through Abilene, where he met up with Samuel Cook, a good friend and ACU associate professor of music, who rode with him as far as Brownwood. Later, he cycled through New Zealand.

“There’s this great picture of me bicycling through Hurricane Harvey,” he said. “People say how could you bicycle through Hurricane Harvey? And I say, ‘How could you not?’ ”

Then it was back to work on the Webb.

“I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” Acton said. “My apartment door to the mission operation center [at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland] was a 7-minute walk. I would continually be there in the control room and we would be looking at images or whatever, and I’d have a team of people looking at the computers. I’d say ‘OK, do this and do this,’ and then I’d go home and sleep a few hours and come back and do it again. If anything important happened I wanted to be there.”

That hard work paid off. “Now that it’s considered an operational telescope, it’s no longer about making it work; it’s about keeping it working and using it for science,” he said.

While one uncle set him on his early path in physics, another provided encouragement and professional inspiration. Dr. Loren Acton, a former NASA space shuttle astronaut, noticed his nephew’s keen interest in science as a high school student. He arranged for Scott to spend the summer at his workplace at the time, the Palo Alto Research Laboratory, where he was introduced to the optics used on telescopes.

The former astronaut followed the development of the Webb with great interest, as he watched his nephew work on a project to explore the universe he once saw in person from space.

“I was a little closer to what was happening than the average person,” he said, “and occasionally Scott would send me an email of what was going on. I just kept my fingers crossed, and lo and behold it came off. I’m pretty proud.”

As Scott Acton looks toward his next challenge, his goal, as always, is to find significance in his work.

“I’ve always felt the challenge in any career is to balance finding meaning in the actual hours and minutes you spend working with finding meaning in the years,” he said. “It’s possible to go to work and enjoy what you do. But I think there’s another element where you ask yourself, ‘Am I an appropriate steward with the years I’ve been given?’ It’s possible to enjoy your occupation but not feel any sense of accomplishment. And it’s possible to go to work every day and just hate it while recognizing that what you’ve done is extremely important.

“I feel like the James Webb Space Telescope enabled me to check both of those boxes,” he said. “It’s really fun to be part of the scientific discovery, but also to know there are kids out there who are going to look at the universe and think of it differently, be excited about it. Maybe the universe doesn’t care whether or not we’re looking at it, but I care.”

– Robin Saylor
From ACU Today magazine