Does spacetime stand on its own?

Vierstein

The way I understood spacetime, we think of spacetime being its own entity, with which matter interacts, the way there is water in an aquarium wether there are fish or not inside it and the fish then interact with that medium.

Couldnt it be possible, that rather than spacetime being its own entity with matter residing in it, or matter being a consequence of spacetime, that it is the other way around, that spacetime is a proeprty that all matter has?

If that would not be the case, it would mean that matter could exist outside of spacetime. So is there a possibility that what we experience as the fabric of spacetime is really a spacetimefield, a property of all matter in the universe that interacts with each other?

Drakkith

Possibilities don't matter much. Just because we can conceive of something being a certain way doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it is actually that way. Current accepted theory states that spacetime is the framework that everything in the universe acts within. Ask yourself, is there any way to tell the difference between what you are asking and what we already describe it as?

Khashishi

Ok, this sounds like Mach's conception of space-time. One problem with Mach's principle is the rotating bucket of water, with nothing else in the universe. If there is nothing else in the universe, why does the water get pulled to the edges of the bucket? The bucket must be rotating relative to something else, some background space-time.

Check this out: ls.poly.edu/~jbain/philrel/philrellectures/11.InterpretingGR.pdf