I read an article this week by Ethan Siegel Ph.D., astrophysicist, writing about photons. He notes that in our expanding Universe, for billion upon billions of years, the photon seems to be one of the very few particle types that has an apparently infinite lifetime. Photons are the quanta that make up light, and in the absence of any other interactions that force them to change their properties, they are eternally stable, with no hint that they would transmute into any other particle.
In other words, light is eternal. Unlike most everything else in the cosmos.
There’s a lovely phrase in the ancient Requiem Mass (a mass for the deceased): “May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord.” “Light eternal” — well, there you are, light IS eternal!
And what’s God’s first act of creation in Genesis 1? “Let there be light.”
Then there’s 1 John 1:5 “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Of course John is speaking metaphorically here — God isn’t LITERALLY ‘light’. But the eternal character of light makes John’s metaphor more apt than he likely could have imagined.
With that in mind, consider this from Siegel’s article:
“…black holes will begin decaying via Hawking radiation faster than they grow, and that means the production of even greater numbers of photons than went into the black hole in the first place. Over the next ~10^100 [that’s 1 followed by 100 zeros] years or so, every black hole in the Universe will eventually decay away completely, with the overwhelming majority of the decay products being photons.
In other words, in time, black holes — the darkest entities in the cosmos — will fade away and transform into eruptions of Light. Seems like there’s a sermon there…
(Siegel’s article can be found here)