Think of the universe as a painting. There’s the image made in paint, and the surface it was painted on. The canvas.
The stars, the planets, the gasses, the matter and energy and even the space between are the paint. What’s the canvas? Is there a canvas? Would the canvas follow the same rules as the paint?
I believe what you are looking for is spacetime which is the foundation that all of the universe exists on. My layman’s understanding is that objects with mass “curve” or “bend” spacetime around them and this is actually how gravity effects objects. An object moving along a straight path (from it’s perspective if on a small enough scale) which is actually following a curved path of spacetime will move in a curved path.
This gives a visual representation of the curving of spacetime.
This shows how a super massive object like a white dwarf or black hole distorts and eventually “breaks” spacetime.
This video also shows it visually fairly well.
How do quantum physics play with spacetime?
I’m probably not asking the right question for what I mean… For context into my own thoughts process here, I originally thought of the question when reading a science post on quantum physics vs general relativity and how they don’t mesh and wondered “could we be seeing the medium simply behaving differently than the art?”
My understanding is that quantum physics is the study of the incredibly small, and general and special relativity are the study of everything else. They don’t overlap (rules for big don’t work for small, and vice versa) and are two separate understandings. Which is why the, hopefully, next big thing will be a unifying theory that applies to everything. I believe Stephen Hawking was a well known scientist working on finding a universal theory.
Which doesn’t really answer your question, but it’s a question far surpassing my knowledge. I think quantum mechanics just doesn’t interact with spacetime, or at least not in a meaningful way (mass of an electron is so incredibly small it isn’t perceptively effected by spacetime curves).
I would be happy for someone with more knowledge to come and prove me wrong though, these are fascinating fields.
