It is not a spacial dimension. Our movement through time works very differently from movement through space.

However, movement through space does not require a force. An object in motion stays in motion. If time did behave like a spacial dimension, then the only time any force would be pushing us through it is when we came in contact with something moving at a different speed.

Time is a dimension that describes the progression of events. It is not a physical force that pushes us through it, but rather a concept that helps us understand and measure the passing of events.

The concept of time is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, and it is an important aspect of many physical laws and theories. However, the nature of time itself is still not fully understood and is a subject of ongoing research and debate in physics and other fields. Some theories, such as relativity, suggest that time is not a fixed, universal concept but rather a relative quantity that can be affected by the presence of matter and energy.

It's important to note that the concept of time as the fourth dimension is a purely human construct, used to describe the progression of events and to provide a frame of reference for understanding the world around us. The concept of time does not have a physical existence in the same way that other dimensions, such as length, width, and height, do.

Nothing needs to push us through time, we just are moving through it. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. The planets don't get pushed forward in their orbits, but they continue to go around their orbits.

It sounds like you are asking, what is pushing time forward? That's what time is doing, it's moving forward and we go with it. It can be slowed down or sped up and we would still be moving with it but in a different frame of time. So far we know that mass and velocity can manipulate the passage of time, so it wouldn't be a leap to say that mass and velocity could be the driving forces of time.

Gravity is the force that in a way “generates” time. Time and space are intertwined by gravity. Humans are taught to view time as a passage, a river, a flow; requiring one be here and then there. Or humans view it as a location mechanism, as though finding a coordinate on a graph.

Time is neither of those things, our lives are marked only by our experiences as decaying energy, perceptive to the combined forces within the universe.

My best answer is that perception is the force pushing us through time. Gravity, as a wave, is the force that binds certainty of position, to certainty of velocity(speed & direction), we can only absolutely certain of one of those two: a change in gravity can change the space in between the two points speed is measured over or it will mutate the velocity one is traveling.

Our relative perception of time is marked by how we decay during the journey between two points

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I don't have an answer, but isn't gravity often thought of as a force that spans the time dimension in some way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation)

Things experiencing higher levels of gravity will move through time faster than when in lower gravity.

We're always going through time at the rate of 1s every second... That's constant speed motion (or inertial motion). Inertial motion doesn't require any force. Once accelerated, any object will continue moving unless another force slows it down.

Nothing really "pushes" us through it, that metaphor doesn't really work. More like it "happens" in the universe around us.

One answer is entropy. This might help:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time#:~:text=Entropy%20is%20one%20of%20the,can%20increase%2C%20but%20not%20decrease.

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We don't move through time, our perception of it changes. If we saw time as a dimension in space and looked at an unmoving ball, it would look like a cylinder with one rounded end at the point in time where it was created and one at the point where it was destroyed. A planet orbiting the sun would look like a helix spiraling along the path of the sun through the galaxy.

But our perception of time isn't broad enough. We only see one "instant" at a time, just a infinitesimal slice of the whole. We can see things changing but we can't see their whole existence at once.

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Assuming we treat time the same way we treat the other dimensions "force" is required. A force is only required to change the speed/direction you are moving.

And considering as far as we can tell everything moves forward at a speed of one second per second. With no change in direction or speed we shouldn't expect a "force" in the first place.

That said, time is already weird and screwy anyway so the question doesn't really work either.

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