I'm writing a little book, and a section of the story tells of time within the universe stopping, but an outside observer can see the universe. How would light look to that person? Would the stars and nebula appear the same as they always do?
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Your question, which Einstein would have called one of his "thought-experiments" made me realize something extraordinary (if I'm right, that is). If time stopped, the outside observer would see it vanish!
Let's shrink your experiment down a little. Let's say you have a glass box, and the inside of the box is a button that when pressed, freezes time inside the box. You grab a flashlight, turn it on, and toss it in. You see the flashlight enter the box, but as soon as it lands on the button, it (and the button) disappear! In fact, I think you would see the inside of the box "go dark".
Why? Because if everything in the box were "frozen in time" then all the photons (light particles) would be frozen in place too, no light coming from inside the box would reach your eye, and you would see nothing but a glass box filled with inky darkness. Instead of seeing a "snapshot" with a frozen beam of light emerging from the flashlight, you would see nothing at all (as soon as the photons that had already escaped from the box the moment the button was pressed zoomed by). Also, the box's contents would not only be frozen in time, they would be literally frozen, from a thermal perspective. If the atoms that make up the flashlight are perfectly still, the temperature would be, by defintion, absolute zero. So to an outside observer, the box (or your universe) would become infinitely dark and infinitely cold!
Let's shrink your experiment down a little. Let's say you have a glass box, and the inside of the box is a button that when pressed, freezes time inside the box. You grab a flashlight, turn it on, and toss it in. You see the flashlight enter the box, but as soon as it lands on the button, it (and the button) disappear! In fact, I think you would see the inside of the box "go dark".
Why? Because if everything in the box were "frozen in time" then all the photons (light particles) would be frozen in place too, no light coming from inside the box would reach your eye, and you would see nothing but a glass box filled with inky darkness. Instead of seeing a "snapshot" with a frozen beam of light emerging from the flashlight, you would see nothing at all (as soon as the photons that had already escaped from the box the moment the button was pressed zoomed by). Also, the box's contents would not only be frozen in time, they would be literally frozen, from a thermal perspective. If the atoms that make up the flashlight are perfectly still, the temperature would be, by defintion, absolute zero. So to an outside observer, the box (or your universe) would become infinitely dark and infinitely cold!
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If you have an observer in a separate universe where time has not stopped, what he would see is a snapshot of the way things were when time stopped. It would be something similar to when the picture freezes on your television and the sound goes out.
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If time just stopped? I believe you would see things for how they actually were since light would travel instantaneously not being bound by the constraints of time. What you are describing is omnipotence, and humans don't know how that would look.
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Time stopping is meaningless.
We would not exist, the universe would not exist.
We would not exist, the universe would not exist.
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I don't believe that this problem can be logically answered.