I think the sky rolling up like a scroll contained in Rev 6:9-15 refers to a man made event. It's not so much the sky rolling up, but retreating at the advance of the debris kicked up by war. It's the debris that blotted out the sun and caused the moon to appear red. Matt 25, Daniel 9, 11, and 12 give the clues, along with the full context of the opening of the 2 seals. The last to be saved was born, as per opening of the 5th seal. The desolation is the abscence of of those who would be God's people, and was caused by man. The 6th seal containing the rolling up of the sky in retreat of the destruction, is the end.
"Light, no time passing, but time passing for other observers"
The electromagnetic field still exists in time. Any photon flying through the vacuum still interacts with the virtual photons, and other particles in the vacuum. As it flies along, it interacts with all possible particles contained as pairs within the vacuum. In classical EM, it is considered polarization of the vacuum and results in the permittivity and permeability of free space. Field theory just elaborates on the details. The interactions are the clock which ticks, and cause the speed of light to be limited.
The photons, particles of light, are movement of energy through the vacuum. The field is the polarization of the vacuum. If it's simply a static field, the photons pop in and out of existance and dance in the sea of virtual particles. If the field is not constant, they move in some net direction at the speed of light, dancing as they move along the way in the sea of particles.
The speed of light shouldn't be taken as a boundary. It is just the result of interaction. The boundary is a limitation that limits life in this world to this world. Life here must rest on the dust, which is the underlying physics, that supports the function of sentient, rational beings.
My musings on the Revelation prophesy of the heavens being rolled back like a scroll are different from yours --- which might be expected since I am drawn to geometric physics.
To me, it is literal and is related to the structure of physical reality which I see as more than a four dimension block, three of space and 1 of time.
I tend to agree with Vafa and Wesson that there are more temporal (time) dimensions – also that the extra dimension(s) can explain mass. (Particularly expanded dimensions versus compactified Kaluza-Klein dimensions.)
After all, the Higgs field/boson which the standard model "needs" to explain ordinary matter (5% of the critical density of the university) has not yet been observed or made by either Fermilab or CERN. For those interested, 25% of the critical density is dark matter, high gravity such as in the center of galaxies. The remaining 70% is dark energy which behaves like negative gravity – or space/time “outdents” accelerating the expansion of the universe.
That is what I see happening in the Revelation prophesy, an inter-dimensional negative gravity phenomenon which accelerates the universe, making it “roll up like a scroll.”
BTW, Lisa Randall suggests (and I agree) that the reason gravity is so small by comparison to the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong atomic and weak atomic) is that gravity is inter-dimensional.
And my personal favorite is offered by P.S. Wesson in his article Five Dimensional Relativity and Two Times: that time-like paths of massive particles in four dimensions can arise from null paths in a fifth dimension, where there is an oscillation around the hypersurface we call space/time. His article also suggests that a particle in the fifth dimension could be multiply imaged in the four dimensions, and that the weak equivalence principle in the four dimensions may be the symmetry of a corresponding five-dimensional metric.
Or to put it another way, instead of there being 1080 particles in the visible four dimensions, it could actually be the case that as little as a single particle in the fifth dimension is imaged 1080 times in the four dimensions of normal human experience.
Any hoot, that’s my two cents for the discussion…