Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)

To try and answer your point a bit more directly: time isn't a force, just like distance isn't a force. A force is something that induces action. If you experience a force, you're induced to act. (Some debate about if gravity is a genuine force, but that's getting messy.)

Time is what a clock does, and distance is what a ruler does. On the one hand, both time and distance are mathematical fiction to parameterize aspects of the universal state. On the other hand, Im 2m tall and my clock is making a periodic tick noise. So, time and distance really are aspects of phenomena, rather than phenomena in their own right, and as such are fiction. However, the aspects of phenomena they refer to have so far turned out to be pretty useful and appear in most phenomena we've encountered, and we think this is because both emerge from aspects of the fundamental phenomenon interacting with itself to create the other phenomena. (This is why we're trying to unify QM and GR, and why the approach is based on entanglement and information cascades.)

My point was that there's no fundamental difference between time and distance, they're either both there or both not there in exactly the same sense, we can travel through both in the same sense (if not same freedom), but only very rarely do people get insistent that distance doesnt exist, and usually only when making a highly technical point. Never have I had someone not understand what I mean by moving a foot to the left, even if they ultimately don't believe that distance exists. This comment was like that: insisting we talk in the highly technical language of distance not existing, but refusing to make the standard and well understood lift of "move a foot to the left" to that language. There's a very straightforward notion of travel, even if we're talking about around a parameter space. It's that partial use of technical machinery that frustrated me -- if you're going to have a technical discussion, don't play obtuse and refuse to make reasonable translations if other people's statements. My comment about people who know a little was mostly just venting frustration that people who are new to the highly technical aspects often can't (and don't even realize they should) make those lifts, then end up stridently talking about how the unlifted claim makes no senae in their freshly learned framework. To be fair, I was worse about that than most, and should learn to be extra patient.

My snarky comment was snarky, but had a point: time is one of the open questions in modern physics, and unless you really want to get in to the heavy stuff, less is more. About the best view to have in your head is "there's no time but what your (and everyone else's) pocket watch says". Your watch needn't agree with mine, though. (And indeed, your head is a slightly different age than your feet, from all the standing, sitting, etc in a gravity well.)

To summarize, Id say that time and distance are meta-phenomena: they're consistently behaved, widespread features of phenomena we discover, but we have good reason to expect that it's an emergent feature of a deeper phenomenon.

Again, sorry for my earlier replies, and I hope I havent put you off asking questions!