Note for Phys 2020.
Physics and Society
24/7/87. S.K.
On “Time” and “Eros/Passion”.
I. Introduction.
We divided this course, for convenience, into three parts. We have now come to the Part III: “The Future of Science”. You have heard what mistakes scientists, including this professor here, had made, in the past up to the present. Now it is your turn to make your own mistakes. I stress here that it is you that creates “the Science of the Future”. I have concerns for the Future, but all I can do is to watch you from my grave.
However, talks on Future are talks in Hope. And perhaps, it may be helpful if I give you some encouragement. I shall do so, in a manner peculiar to physicists. Namely, I give you a lecture about “Time”. And I shall point out where “Eros/Passion” can be located in the Time Dimension. What the Physics of Time has go to do with “Eros/Passion” is the punch line of my story.
In addition, I like to tell you what I learned from Native Science/Philosophy. I shall discuss the Native Metaphysics of Time in comparison with our dominant, Euro American Metaphysics of Time. This has also to do with the Spirituality of Native Americans. In order to discuss that I have to talk of the relation between European sense of Time and its Eros/Passion. And like the most things I talk about, the relation is on a two-way feedback. By trying to appreciate what other cultures offer, we understand our own better.
[References]
As background and further readings, I refer you to a few books here.
A.N. Whitehead Process And Reality Free Press. 1929.
H. Bersson Time And Free Will Harper Torchbooks. 1910
V. Deloria Jr. God Is Red Laurel Book. 1973.
J. Highwater The Primal Mind Harper & Row. 1944.
M. Berman The Reenchantment of the World Cornell U Press. 1981
H. Mareuse Eros And Civilization Vintage Books. 1955
M. Foucault The History of Sexuality (3 vol.) Vintage Books. 1978
M. Jammer The philosophy of Quantum Mechanics John Wiley 1974.
II. The Future is “Nothing”. But then, Why talk of Future?
1. The first thing I would like to draw your attention is that “Future” is not “Fact”. The “Future” does not even exist in the Materialist sense. If you are still thinking that science such as Physics is about “Facts”, then you would say that “Future” cannot be a subject of science. Talks of the Future are talks of “nothing” (as yet).
Logically, you are quite right. But you also note that it is meaningless to know anything, if there is no Future, any systematic knowing takes a finite Time. If you did not think there would be a “Future”, you would not have invested the time and efforts to know anything. Besides, the most impressive displays of the “Power of Science” has been its ability to “Predict”. But, “Prediction” is a version of “Prophecy” and it is a matter of “Teleology”. It concerns with the question of “Belief/Faith” about unknown Future.
2. Science may be just a set of descriptions of what has happened, as some philosophers contend. Or Science may be just “attempts to explain” what have been observed in the Past.
I suppose “description” and “explanation” are parts of Science. Bt without some “illusion” of the Power to Predict, Science would have been a hobby like “stamp collection” and commentaries thereof. Certainly, such a hobby would not have impressed people enough for them to give the Billions of Dollars in grants. It could not have been a profession, let alone being edified and valued as an intellectual discipline — and, you would not have been forced to take physics course by the “Authority” , which does not recognize your intense hatred of Physics hammered into your heads —.
You venerate “knowledge” in general, because “Knowledge” is useful in your Future. !!!
And you pay for it.
[I have reservation as to the above assertions. I would view that “intelligence” is a matter of your own Creation. The “Dead Knowledge” in books or in computer memory is not useful, unless you use them. It is your use that is the value, not the “Knowledge” itself. However, let me stick to the “common belief” of our culture for now.]
At any rate, thinking of Future is inevitable. The Future is not a “Fact”, but it does affect science. The Future is “nothing” (as yet), but it is very important to us.
3. You can take an extreme pessimistic position to say “Humans cannot possibly know anything about Future” and even accuse me that I am “Irrational” and “Irresponsible” to talk of Future that I know nothing about. Or you might judge that I “lost touch with Reality” (insane), where “Reality” consists of Facts only.
4. But, I point out that at least some of you also commit the same “sin” or “insane act” of thinking and talking of the Future. I give you a familiar example.
In the typical Love Affairs, of which some of you have had a great deal of experiences, there are frequent references to “Commitment”. If you have not heard the word, and have no idea about what it means, let me explain it to you by an illustration.
——
In the play, My Fair Lady, [A.J. Lerner. Coward-McCann. 1956], the climax comes in Act II, when the heroine asks: “What’s to become of me?” A professor of Linguistics, Dr. Higgins, made a bet and successfully taught this poor girl Eliza from the East End slum to say correctly “Rain in Spain falls mainly on a plain” and to be admitted as a lady by the High Society.
Incidentally, even a great physicist, Michael Faraday had to learn the same in order to be admitted to the Royal Society. British society is a Class Society, where the art of “Snobbism” flourishes. And in the art, to have a mastery of the peculiar language (lingo) is very important.
At any rate, after the smashing success in the demonstration of his power of knowledge in Linguistics, Dr. Higgins has no further use of Eliza. The experiment is over. The scientist predicted the outcome and indeed it became “True”.
Was the girl happy, having been well accepted into the High Society and charmed most anybody? No.
She complains; “It is good that you succeeded in your science. But what about me?” She is asking for a “Commitment” for the Future.
In her case, the “commitment” she is seeking is not “security”. For she had all manners of guys chasing after her. The question is rhetorical and actually a confession of her “vulnerability”. She fell in Love with this arrogant son of b…, who think of her no more than an experimental animal picked up from the gutter of London slum, and treated her like a slave who brings his slippers while he reads news paper.
His idea of marriage was probably with a lady from a “Proper Family” with a big dowry or high society connections for his patronage.
The enlightened feminists today would say that Eliza is irrational, if not insane. They would say; “To hell with guys like that!”. Of course, Professor Higgins has all that “correct” power words, such as “Purely Subjective”, “Your Imagination”, etc., to talk back.
But the “commitment” is also “vulnerability”. It is a gamble on the unknown, unpredictable Future.
Materialistic girls today may think that “commitment” is a guarantee of future comfort. I know even radical revolutionary women, such a s Rosa Luxemburg dreamed of a nice cozy house with white picket fence, of being taken to Sunday walk with kids, and all that sort of things I do not blame girls to wish that. But, no one can guarantee the Future in such a sense. Girls know that, yet ask for “promise”. The reason for this is not “commitment” as guaranteed material security. It is, if any, more than that.
You might say that it is a commitment to “Share the Fantasy” (hope, faith) of the Future. It is not an exaggeration to say that the commitment asked was the “meaning of life”. In fact, even colloquialism refers to it as “Meaningful Relationship”.
———-
5. Now, you are certainly right to think that such a problem is not a matter of “Physics”, (a pun intended). But I am going to tell you Physics of such matters, any way.
You know that the Future is not knowable and that you are vulnerable to all sorts of accidents, dangers, happenings, circumstance, contingencies, etc. The fact that you are the wisest and nicest guy in the world does not make you invincible. You would like to deny it, but whoever you are, you are just as vulnerable as everybody.
So, you accept your vulnerability and go on living. One of my friend is a Christian minister. He told me that the name of Judeo-Christian God is “What Will be, will be” (Que sera sera.). I would say that is “reasonable” enough. But, then, why people fall in love and become more vulnerable than they already are? I blame “Eros/Passion” for the insanity. Of course, I think it beautiful, I mean tragically beautiful. The idea may be that human existence is vulnerable any way and therefore one has nothing to lose by falling in love. One might just as well be possessed by Eros and be Passionate.
And, I beg you here to note that it is all because of the Time Dimension. If we had no Time, we would have had no trouble like that. You might, of course, say that you have no Time nor Energy for Love Affairs, let alone thinking about Time. But by that you are saying you are dead.
6. [For those who are hardnosed businessperson, I mention one problem in Economics of Profit Maximization. This is known as “Arrow’s Paradox”. It so happened that even in a perfectly deterministic world, the “profit” (or “utility”) depends on the Time Interval chosen for the calculation of the maximum.
What is profitable in short term is not necessarily profitable in long terms. That is, the maximum cannot be calculated without choosing a time scale.
If one takes the Economics of Profit (Utility) Maximization as the proto-model for Rationality, the Rationality cannot exist for indefinite Time interval for which Humans may exist. Since you do not know how long you live, you cannot calculate how to get the Maximum out of your wife or husband.
You might say: “One who laughs last, laughs the best”. But the problem is that we have no idea when the last is. Economy is irrational.]
III. Time is not a thing. Then, what is it?
1. O.K. you understand why we have troubles. It is because of Time. And because we have troubles, we think and talk about Time. But what is this thing called “Time”?
Well, “Time” is not a “thing”. It is “nothing”. It does not exist, in any objective, material, sense.
It is a way we think and talk. It is a mere “concept”, or a mere “word”. What is worse, there are many different senses to the same word “Time”. Even in the Physics of General Relativity, there is a well known ambiguity as to which “t” in the equation is the “Time”.
You may be asked by your friend “Do you have Time?” Your friend may be asking if yo have a watch to tell what Time it is then. Or the friend may mean to “have” or “spend” a Time together.
And, the “It” of the utterance “What time is It?” means nothing. The utterance is saying “What time is the time?”. That is worse than the “It” of the “It rains”. And, nobody “has” Time, hence can “spend” Time.
But, don’t be silly. They are “Idiomatic” expressions. You say “It rains like dogs and cats”. Since you have never seen hundreds of dogs and cats falling down, that is a bad metaphor. But, you know what the expression means as your friends know. Idioms are like the “Joke #19” which do make you and your friends laugh. Or, Idioms are like Rituals in language art, commonly shared by a community.
“Time” is an Idiom. By our linguistic habit or ritual, we supposedly understand the idiom. That is, until some crazy physicist or philosopher asks, “What is Time?”
If you were Wittgenstein, you might say that “Time” ought not to be placed as the Subject of a sentence. This is a typical case of “pseudo-philosophical” problems created by misuse-abuse of sentence structure. “Time” ought to be treated as an “Adverb”, not a “Noun”.
[Some Physicists are fond of doing Wittgensteinian tricks with words. They say “Electron” is a Verb, just as “Red” is an adjective. There is no such “thing” as an “electron” nor “red”. But then, is “Energy” a “verb” or “adverb”? It is ambiguous. And the ambiguity is essential to our art of language. In mathematical logic, we found that what is precisely definable is meaningless. (I shall explain this to you later). So, we try to find “meaning” in the ambiguity. This is the “Uncertainty Principle of Linguistics”.]
But you would complain that saying that Time is not a “noun” does not help you much. You are right! In order to know the Idiom, we have to know in what sort of occasions, we use the word “Time” (and associated words), like anthropologists do to people of other cultures. Only in our case, we have to play the role of the anthropologists (outside observers) to our own “peculiar” thinking and language habits. However, it turned out that it is easier to observe others. To us, “I” is the most difficult thing to know. We would, therefore, start with “Time” senses of other cultures and hope our learning of others help us to know ourselves.
2. Let us, therefore, take our “prejudice” that American Indians do not have the sense of Time.
In God Is Red, the author Deloria says that Natives have no sense of Time. Deloria is a Native. Well. Is it true?
First of all, I like to tell you that the American Natives had a well developed Astronomy. Mayan Calendar was very accurate. There are archaeological sites all over North America which indicate that the Indians observed Time. Perhaps, it is possible that the Natives lost their “ancient” science under the colonial repression. And they themselves might believe that Indians do not have science. If so, it is a bad superstition, if not a self-imposed racial prejudice.
[Do you know our mathematics came from Arabs and East Indians? Today, it seems that Arabs and East Indians themselves think that Mathematics is European invention. The repression, and racial prejudice are internalized. This is sad. And I must tell you that you yourself may have the same underestimate of yourself. You think without me teaching Physics, you cannot do Physics. That is a sad superstition. I am just as stupid as yu are, if not worse. You can do anything, if you think you can.]
That “Indians don’t have the sense of Time” may refer to their apparent habit of not being “punctual”. They agree to a Time of a public meeting. Only after one hour later, some people begin to trickle in to the meeting! Even then, they do not show any sign of concern about Time. We hear such stories many times. And Natives themselves talk and laugh at that.
The trouble is, however, that Americans, Canadians, and Japanese are the same. In village meeting, etc., people come one hour later. When U.S. occupied Japan, Americans used to give Japanese lectures about the importance of Punctuality. To be modern civilized people, one has to be punctual. The lecture sounded very good. But when I came to the U.S. some years later, I find out that trains never run on Time. In Japan, if train is late, they pay money back. And usually Japanese trains keep accurate Time, say like within 10 seconds of the scheduled time.
In hunting of Buffaloes, the Natives had to coordinate their actions within the accuracy of a split second. Otherwise, Buffaloes would escape and the village go hungry. Natives do keep appointed Time, that is, when they wanted. Don’t you believe the myth like Indians have no sense of Time. They do not come to the meeting on Time, because it is an expression of “protest”. It is not “dignified” to show up on Time for town meetings etc. They are saying that they do not want to live by Whitemen’s “Norm”.
[Be aware girls or boys who let you wait on date. It is a well known trick. You are being hooked! Besides, she or he is demonstrating “who is the boss” in the situation.]
So were Japanese peasants. They, perhaps unconsciously, wanted to insult government officials by making them wait for hours. That is why they came later. They knew what is the Time very well. Interestingly, they had much faster communication to know what officials are going to say. And American occupation officials often embarrassed by finding out that people already knew what their Head Quarter is planning before they themselves were informed.
The “Punctuality” was a Christian ritual invented by monks in monastery. Japanese did not want to behave like Christians. They found out that trains in Christian countries never run on time, so they now run their train exactly on time without feeling guilty. It is their own Norm, not Euro American Norm.
Likewise, if and when Indians wanted, they can be very precise. They have an advantage of “dreaming” beforehand what is going to happen. [See Highwater.]
3. But, if you take Time to be some line-like segment punctuated at the Beginning and at the End, then it is right to say Indians and Japanese lack the sense of Time. I point out to you that the Punctuated Linear Time is distinctively Judeo-Christian. And the peculiar sense of Time is “Religious”, with a sense of violence for the punctuations. They mark and sense Time by “points”. Euro Americans often say that the “birth” is traumatic. And the “death” is dreaded. They constitute “events” with a “religious” significance, or traumatic impact.
In a contrast, Indians and Japanese do not understand the trauma and dread. Rather, to them, Time is “Continuity”, not “Punctuality”. Japanese trains run on Time very accurately, because rail men are preoccupied with making “connections” to other trains. It is not for the sake of making punctual events.
And, Birth, Death occurs more or less “natural” to them. Japanese peasant women used to go work in field in the morning, give birth in the field, carry the baby and vegetables on her back home in the evening. The events do make impacts, but not as much as Euro Americans get. There is not “religious” significance to the events, let alone “sins”, disasters, etc. The happenings are “events”, but taken as “course of events” in “flow”. That is, their sense “events” includes “Flow of Time”, not “Point”. In physicists’ language, the Euro American Time is Newtonian, whereas Indian Time is that of Relativity (Einsteinian).
Besides, the Native Time is not only continuous but also “internal”. It is their own Time, not something imposed by external authority, such as God or Physics. If they say Time is a part of Universe, then the Universe is something to which they participate. It is not external.
[E. Husserl” Zur Phenomenologie des innern Zeitbewusstseins discussed an “Inner Time”. But his was the European Time. I would call it “Ego Time”. It is subtly different from Indian Inner Time.
The difference clearly shows up when Indians talk of their ancestral Time. The tense in such talks is in “Present tense”. European cannot do that. Because the Past is no longer in the Inner Time.
However, Existentialists, such as Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety apparently came close to include “continuity” in Time. But, here again, it is European Time. I shall explain the difference between “Anxiety” and “Eros/Passion” later.]
They may go to work in a factory and may be forced to punch Time Card. That is alienated external Time. They would resent that. In our bourgeoisie life, we worry about Time, such as the end of the month by which time we have to pay all bills and mortgages. Small merchants have to worry about Time, for the interests on their debts are counted by the day, week, or month. The Time as such is external. It is not “your making” that the Time passes. You do not participate in the making (creation) of Time. (God did it.)
4. To be sure, in Newtonian Physics, physicists do make “events” by observing them. There, the “Egos” of the physicists are involved, and the scientists do take credit for the events. The young observatory assistant who saw the latest Super-Nova became a hero, just because he happened to see and registered his “discovery” in the sacred record kept by the institution of Astronomy before anybody else. [See Discovery. June 1987.]
However, the “observations” have to be according to the official ritual code. Newtonian Physics requires that the observation to be externalized by use of “scientific instruments”, such as telescope, measuring sticks, etc., and they must be expressed in the edified format of description, such as saying “at a point of Time; t = 02:15:32 at a point of location x = 12.45, y = 0.66, z = 302.14” to make an “event”. By such “Initiation Rituals” or “Editing Rituals”, the personal experiences are converted to a “Scientific data”. The ritual procedure “purifies” and eliminate the “human experience”. The Science that replaced God’s Truth cannot allow contaminations by human experiences. That is how the Time is externalized.
Even Einstein’s Relativity is understood by many scientists as a physics consisting of “events” which are just the same as those of Newtonian events. It took emergence of Quantum Physics to break this “God’s Eye View” of the world to do science.
[The “God’s Eye View” is the one pretends that the knower, as a superior being, is outside of the world that is observed. That gives “Objectivity” and “Value Neutrality” to Science and Scientists.
However, by doing so, scientists are alienated from the Nature. They become “outsiders”.
The communication becomes one-way. You get information from the object, but you give nothing to the object. This is a perfect “intellectual colonialism, exploitation”.
To be sure, this is only a religious-ideological fantasy. In real life, we cannot be like God. There is no such thing as “Value Neutral Knowledge” possible to humans. Humans cannot be outside this Universe, or what Buddhist call “Vicious Reality”.]
6. Then came Quantum Physics. The first public “event” marked the emergence of Quantum Physics in the Euro American Time was a public lecture give by W. Heisenberg in Chicago in 1929, Heisenberg announced “Uncertainty Principle” in the lecture (note that he did not do so in an academic paper.)
Among the audience in the Chicago lecture, there was a poet. The poet was Robert Frost. He narrates his reaction. [The Norton Reader. (Ed.) A.M. Eastman 3rd ed. Norton & Co. 1973 p. 519.]
“The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving.
You can see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of the arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.”
The poet was absolutely right. This is perhaps surprising to the most scientists today. For they think poets would not understand anything about physics. And around 1930’s, the “second class” physicists were saying that there is only 3 intellectual giants who understand Quantum Physics in the World. Actually, the “3” was an exaggeration. They probably meant, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg. But there were others such as Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, et al. Hideki Yukawa’s work on Nuclear Force/Meson Theory was done in early 1930’s in Japan. There were a lot more physicists who understood the new physics.
Besides, what a French Philosopher, Henry Bergson was writing on Time in 1890’s was very much in agreement with Quantum Physics. In terms of “operational approach” and “uncertainty/probability” that the new physics came to rely upon, there were philosophers like, C.S. Peirce, John Dewey. And, Poetical Philosophy of George Santayana, Existentialism of Martin Heidegger were already there. In retrospect, we can now appreciate their commonness with Quantum Physics. Only those “second class” scientists did not understand the new physics.
Robert Frost made reference to Zeno’s Paradox of flying arrow. According to Aristotle’s record based on a “hearsay” Zeno, some 2000 years ago, already knew that Newtonian Physics was wrong.
[See also The Reenchantment of the World p. 144-145.]
And more interestingly, Frost was saying “physics is a set of metaphors”. Physics, like poetry, is a linguistic art. Frost knew that in 1929. This is remarkable. Yet it is only an honest statement. Scientists who had psychological hang-ups about “Exact Truth” could not admit that, for the admission would destroy their “religious/ideological” superstition/prejudice. Physics inherited the notion of Absolute Truth from Judeo-Christianity.
As F. Capra in Tao of Physics tells, for non-Christians, it is no big deal to say human intelligence is limited in its capacity to know. However, I point out that since non-Christians had no enigma, they did not develop new physics either. To have problems is important, if you are to learn something. If there is no problem, there is nothing to learn. In this sense, even mistakes are valuable. You ought to think of this “dialectics”.
[I bet if your girl/boy friend is totally “predictable”, then you would lose interest.
Passion would become stronger by pains.
Goethe said ones who do not know the taste of tears would not know love.]
7. Now, the statement of Heisenberg, summarized by Frost is simple. (Frost is accurate, however.) But this does not mean that there are no more implications. In fact, there are several serious implications.
One of the implications is that the Uncertainty Principle suggests that “measurement” (knowing) of exact position of a thing affects and changes the state of the thing. It tells that you cannot know people (thing) without changing or hurting the people (thing). Knowing is interactive, not “neutral”. A psychiatrist, social worker, or teacher to know a client is to change the client, either for better or worse. And the psychiatrist, him- or herself, is affected by knowing. Extending this a bit, one can say that if nothing changes, you did not learn anything.
In relation to our question on Time, the above implication of Uncertainty Principle suggests that “knowing” is “irreversible”. By knowing, you change things. Once changed, you cannot get the innocence of the ignorance back. This in turn implies that in the world where “knowers” exist, the Time can only go one way, though there are other interpretations.
[There are other interpretations such as Time is actually consisting of two-way flow, one from the Past to the Present, and one from the Future to the Present. When two flows (waves) of “Event-Fields” meets, “an event” happens.
And, Time could be “circular”. Then, the above means that the orientation of rotation is in one direction on the Time Loop. Left-hand oriented World and Right-hand oriented World would be different. We do have some observational hints to this.]
This is known as “Arrow of Time” (One-direction-ness of Time). Before Quantum Physics, Statistical Theory on Heat Phenomena, etc. suggested this “one-way-ness”. That was known as “Entropy Law”. Since Statistical Theory relies upon human estimate of probabilities, one can take the Entropy Law as a part of Quantum Physics, and related to the “Knowing Interaction”.
That is to say it is “Knowing” that pushes Time. If there is no knowing (learning) like in the Garden of Eden —, there might not have been Time. And, if you apply “Dialectics” here, you would conclude that if there is no Time, there would have been no knowing.
One could possibly try a “Theology”. Namely that the God that does not change must be ignorant and does not have Time. It would be “Eternal God”, only because he/she cannot Learn anything. Learning means Change. Change means “sensitivity”, but it is “ephemerality” as well. “Stability” (of an institution, system) is incompatible with “Sensitivity” (change, learning). But then, you might apply “Uncertainty Principle” to this dialectical pair, and get to an accommodating compromise for the both. Interestingly, Physicists also call the Uncertainty Principle “Complementarity Principle” (Co-operative Dialectics).
[Ref: M. Janner cited above.
F.A. Wolf Taking the Quantum Leap Harper & Row 1981. Lethb. Pub. Lib. 350. 12.
K. Wilber (ed.) The Holographic Paradigm. Shambhala 1982.]
IV. Physics is (or physicists are) crazy. But what it has to do with Eros/Passion?
1. In a book Responsibilities To Future Generations [E. Partridge (ed.) Prometheus Press] 1980 contains, as the conclusion, “Love of Remote” by Nicolai Hartmann. The article is a partial reprint of a paper in a journal Ethics [vol.2. 1932. p. 311-331.]
Hartmann wrote:
“The Platonic Eros — when we strip it of everything else and attend only to its ethical substance, is deeper absorption of the idea, great passion for it, personal commitment to it. Thsi passion brings it about that a man is transported beyond himself and beyond his environment. It is a man’s losing of himself in his work, his inward life in what is not yet, in what is ‘still on the way from Non-being to Being'” it is the abandonment of the present for what is future, uncertain; the sacrifice of his life for another life, for one more valuable, but one that is not his own.”
I do not like words like “Platonic”. One who does not have courage to say “Eros” pure and simple, it is better that one does not say eros at all. It is nonsense to speak of “strip”, Eros is not a stripper. It looks like an “essence” because Eros manifests in everything and anything. But Eros is a Dynamics, not an “essence”. Taking away the contexts, the contingencies, the environment, the flesh and blood, Eros cannot exist. All these are typical in European Intellectual talk.
Eros/Passion does not care if it is “carnal or not”. Need I say anything as to the silly “Platonic”?
And, it is not as if there exists an entity, or “essence” (atom), called “Passion” and that drives people (he and she) to care for the unknown future either. It is the whole relationships and dynamics spanned over the long time dimension that is the Passion. Even the theological notion of Passion in Christianity had the Time Dimensional sense, which is narrated in N. Kazantzakis’s Grek Passion etc.
But the rest is great.
You do not know, but you care. That is Eros/Passion.
It is on the Time Dimension/Duration, that Eros/Passion becomes sensible, feelable.
If I may add anything to the description, I would include the Time in the sense of History. Time Dimension covers both the Future and Past.
It is the “Continuity”, without insisting “Identity”.
That is: Eros/Passion is for “ephemeral beings” to create. It is not things like “immortality” (egoism, megalomania).
Eros/Passion is like “weaving patterns” that emerges in the “networking” of many relationships, including oppositions. Think of each line of thread to be an image of life in time dimension. What many threads make up is the Eros/Passion. (Granted, it could also be a Hell.) That is, in other words, a “Holographic Time Pattern” emerging in the Ephemerals.
How can we “see” it? No, we cannot see by eyes. We can only see actors and actresses on the stage. The “Play” itself is invisible. You can hear “sounds in sequence”, but you can only sense “music”. [E. Husser} The Phenomenology of Inner Time Movements.] It is a kind of flow of life that carries you. Perhaps, when you finish your life, you may be able to say, “I lived a Passion.”
———
I tried to tell you where you might encounter Eros/Passion in terms of Physics. I hope my story made some sense and be of some help to you.