I feel stupid, but can someone explain to me the difference between time on a clock, which is just a number chosen based on our position relative to the sun, and time in the context of time travel? You can’t travel through a concept.
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Not stupid at all! Time travel as a concept would take a baffling amount of work. The timeline of the universe is a number of causally related quantum states: one state creating the next.
For time travel to work, you'd be taken "back" to a different quantum state of the universe, by unmooring yourself and your time travel device from a given organization of cosmic waveforms, and moving to another. But you also have to move *through space* or you'll fall out of geo-sync with the Earth!
@MLClark this is a great answer, thank you