Fumfer Physics 21: Cosmic Obliteration, Time, and the Faintest Photon
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/13
In this thought-provoking exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore whether the universe could suddenly vanish—an instantaneous obliteration consistent with certain relativistic and quantum-mechanical models. Rosner compares such an event to the physical annihilation of information in a brain destroyed in milliseconds, extending the metaphor to cosmic scales. The conversation delves into the idea of localized collapses, reversals of time, and Frank Tipler’s controversial “resurrection” cosmology. It concludes with speculation on whether photons can fade into nonexistence through infinite redshift, raising questions about how the universe tracks—or forgets—its most fundamental information.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Could the universe wink out of existence instantaneously, or is there too much internal consistency for that to happen?
Rick Rosner: No, it could. There are solutions to relativistic equations and quantum-mechanical systems that describe what an obliteration of the universe would look like—the destruction of structure and correlations (an apparent, not fundamental, loss of information).
I’ve thought about it. One way to imagine it would be everything in the universe changing as if flying apart at nearly the speed of light as a vacuum-decay bubble expanded (altering local physics). I don’t know if you can express that exactly in an equation, but it’s a way to picture it.
Our consciousness is an information-processing system. Imagine if your head were hit by a cannonball traveling at 1,200 feet per second—it would end your conscious experience in a few thousandths of a second.
They were physically obliterated in milliseconds, perhaps even less than a millisecond. They might have had a last fragment of thought, and then that was it. Their brain’s ability to hold any information was obliterated along with the brain itself. There’s probably a way to describe that physically.
I imagine it would look like everything in the universe suddenly rushing away from everything else at the speed of light—nothing able to connect to anything else. From every point of view, at every location, everything would just vanish.
Jacobsen: Could there be a localized collapse—where part of the universe becomes inconsistent and just ceases to exist?
Rosner: Maybe. It’s helpful to think about it in terms of what can happen to your brain. People with Alzheimer’s lose information rapidly compared to healthy individuals. They lose it over years—two, three, eight, fifteen—and we can describe that in physical terms, as the degradation of neural structures and informational coherence.
In the novel I’m writing, there’s a character who survives a school shooting. A .22-caliber bullet blasts away part of her brain. She survives, but she’s left in a twilight state of consciousness—half-aware, half-absent. Eventually, she’s restored artificially. You could describe that, too, in the language of physics—as an interruption and later reconstruction of information processing.
Jacobsen: What if there were a partial collapse of the universe, or a kind of local inconsistency—something that reverses itself? Portions of the universe suddenly enter a reverse-consistent state, where the arrow of time seems to run backward.
Rosner: I don’t really buy that. That’s more of a Frank Tipler idea. Tipler’s the physicist who proposed that, eventually, we’ll all be resurrected because the universe will stop expanding once it runs out of kinetic energy, then start contracting again. As it collapses, the redshift would become a blueshift, and everything would run backward—so, in theory, we’d live our lives again in reverse.
It’s like resurrection, except not really, because we wouldn’t have consciousness of it. Tipler is a Christian, and this feels like an attempt to merge faith with physics. But no, I don’t think that’s how the universe loses information. The arrow of time keeps going in the same direction.
When you look out at the universe, it doesn’t look like it’s 13.8 billion years old anymore. After about 30 billion years, it might look more like it’s only what remains within our observable look-back window—like it’s being nibbled away at the edges. That would appear as an increase in recessional velocity—the cosmological (Hubble) redshift.
If you could turn a dial and adjust the Hubble constant (purely hypothetically), you could increase that apparent expansion rate—the relative velocity per 100 million light-years. Doing so would push distant galaxies past the point of visibility.
By doing that, you’d effectively decrease the observable window of the universe, even though time would still move forward. The arrow of time would continue to function, but the universe’s ability to hold information accessibly within our horizon would diminish.
Jacobsen: In an informational cosmology sense, is there a lowest possible wave for a photon—a least energetic photon you can make before it stops being meaningfully “there”? A photon that’s so weak it ceases to exist in any practical way.
Rosner: I don’t think there’s a theoretical minimum. If you had a ten-trillion-year-old universe—or even a quadrillion-year-old one—and a photon that never hit anything, it would just keep traveling, redshifting, losing energy, stretching across spacetime.
What happens to it then? I don’t know. The universe seems to keep track of particles with mass, but can it entirely lose track of a photon? I’m not sure.
Jacobsen: Do photons disappear beyond our cosmic event horizon when they’ve traveled so long and become so redshifted that they can no longer interact with anything?
Rosner: Maybe. If there’s no record of a photon—no interaction, no trace—then it effectively doesn’t exist. There are countless “implicate” photons produced by the processes of the universe.
Many of them travel so far, for so long, that they become virtually undetectable, existing only in an implicate sense, not as individual photons. On the other hand, under certain speculative cyclic models, a photon could traverse all the way back into a more compact, collapsed universe than our own—perhaps regaining some energy in the process, enough to have an aggregate effect.
I’m not sure, because on one hand, a photon’s energy is reduced by cosmic expansion (cosmological redshift), while the overall curvature of space evolves as energy density decreases. But if a photon enters a region of higher gravitational curvature, its energy is gravitationally blueshifted.
That would look like gravitational acceleration. A photon always travels at the speed of light, but when it moves into a stronger gravitational field, its frequency increases—it gains energy in that local frame. Maybe something like that happens when photons reach regions of extreme curvature near compact objects .
In the aggregate, could they have enough energy—especially if concentrated along galactic filaments—to reignite star formation?
Or maybe it’s the energy lost to curvature that actually changes the geometry of spacetime, allowing structure to evolve. That seems more reasonable: as energy density redistributes, curvature relaxes, and new regions of matter can form stars again through gravitational collapse.
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