Hydrogen · The symbol
Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick
Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. His spiritual reading, beside exact science.
There are two ancient ways of looking at the human being, and they rarely sit at the same table.
One asks what we are made of. It answers with atoms, cells, energy, and measures everything with instruments. The other asks who we are. It answers with words like soul and spirit, and measures everything with life. This page sets the two side by side, without confusing one with the other.
What physics sees
The ordinary hydrogen atom has three things to tell.
A proton, at the center. It's almost all of the atom's mass: about 1,836 times heavier than the electron. It's what gives weight, what stays.
An electron, around it. Extremely light, bound to the proton by electrical attraction. It has an orientation of its own, the spin, which can be aligned with the proton's or opposite to it.
And the flip. When the electron's spin reverses relative to the proton's, the atom releases a radio wave of 1420.405751768 MHz, about 21 cm long. That wave leaves the atom and travels. It can cross the entire galaxy and arrive, thousands of years later, at an antenna here.
It was this wave that scientists chose as the yardstick to measure a human being on the plaque of the Pioneer probes: eight times 21 cm, the height of a woman.
What the ancient text says
In the Christian tradition, the idea that the human being is body, soul and spirit appears in a sentence of the apostle Paul, in the first letter to the Thessalonians. In the King James Version:
"And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Thessalonians 5:23)
Christians themselves read this verse in different ways: some see three parts in the human being, some see two, some see a single whole described by three names. Other traditions speak of other parts, with other words. And many people see no part at all beyond the body. All these readings deserve respect.
Sources: Hydrogen line · Pioneer plaque · 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Almeida Corrigida Fiel (Portuguese)
In Bairo's view
Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. He calls it the 21 cm yardstick. It's his spiritual reading, and that's how it appears here: an image of faith, not a discovery of science. No laboratory has ever measured a soul.
It's easy to understand why the image moves him, piece by piece.
The proton is the body. What weighs, what sustains, what stays in place. Without it, there is no atom.
The electron is the soul. Light, in motion, bound to the body without being the body. It's the one with a direction, and it's the one that, at some moment, turns. A soul, too, can spend a whole life oriented one way and, in an instant, reverse: repentance, decision, conversion, a fresh start.
And the flip is the spirit. What is born from that turn and doesn't stay trapped in the atom. It leaves, travels, crosses the darkness and reaches far, to whoever is listening.
For Bairo, the most beautiful part is that the three only make sense together. The flip doesn't exist without the electron, and the electron has nowhere to turn without the proton. In his faith, the human being is like that: body, soul and spirit in one single thing. And he believes the God he loves dwells in that whole, to the point that the two become one, as told in The God of the impossible.
For you
You don't need to accept this reading to use it as a mirror.
Ask yourself, honestly, how the three parts are doing. The body, which carries everything and is almost never heard: have you been sleeping, eating, resting? The soul, your direction, your choices: is it pointing where you want to go, or where others pointed? And what comes out of you, what reaches others: what have you been emitting into the world?
A small turn, in the right place, can cross a galaxy. Sometimes it's all that's missing.