there are three main states of matter: solid, liquid, gas.
chemical elements fall into three major categories: metals, non-metals, and "metalloids" or "semi-metals".
a corollary of this: chemical substances may be broadly divided into three types—organic, inorganic, and organometallic.
atoms form chiefly three types of bond: metallic, ionic, covalent.
atoms and molecules come in three general types with respect to electric charge: neutral species, positive cations, negative anions.
there are three particles that make up almost all the world's substance: the proton, neutron, and electron.
...and so on. I've scarcely exhausted the list of threes, trios of fundamental concepts, that can be found in the physical sciences. essential trinities are everywhere. I do not say that this somehow "proves" that the fundamental Trinity of my own religion is real; one may also find pairs of things, tetrads of things, etc. but as a Christian—albeit a heretical one—I take some metaphysical interest in the prevalence of triple concepts. Three seems to have some importance to the Cosmos...or it has importance to the human beings who study the Cosmos, and therefore they find threes of things because they expect to find them.
what if the human beings who discovered the structure of the atom had been shaped by a different culture, one that wasn't stamped with the Trinity? one can even dimly imagine a world in which three was considered an unlucky number (arguably one can see hints of this in certain corners of the West) and therefore there would have been a strong irrational prejudice against triple abstractions. would atoms, in that world, somehow have four subatomic particles making it up? that may sound utterly ridiculous, but it's possible that the subconscious expectations of human scientific experimentation in fact determine the shape of the reality they find.
the Trinity is supposed to be of central importance to Christianity but it would be difficult to tell, from looking at the current shape of the religion and the culture it's engendered, a culture positively obsessed with single things and pairs—and those pairs are always hierarchical, always superior vs. inferior, so really the Western fondness for dualities disguises its obsession with One. the Holy Trinity has itself become effectively hierarchical—the Son is merely the tool of the Father and conflated with the Father, while the Holy Spirit has dwindled to a kind of sideshow gimmick. there's probably rather a lot of Christians who think that "the Holy Spirit" means nothing besides spouting a stream of incoherent gabble in public. it's like the Trinity has collapsed.
and...maybe there's a reason for that...a strange, terrifying reason. maybe humanity simply broke the Trinity.
perhaps it's because the West decided to violate quite a different trinity—the dynamic equilibrium among electrons, neutrons, and protons. not for nothing was the first nuclear bomb test called simply Trinity...surely at least some of the Manhattan Project physicists sensed the mystical bond between the Christian Trinity and the physical trinity of subatomic particles that they were hoping to shatter, and guessed that they were in fact tampering in God's domain. that's the punchline to an Ed Wood movie...and yet...it's also true.
~Chara of Pnictogen
