It is my understanding that energy produces a gravitational field regardless of the form it takes.

That's correct, in fact almost nothing Borg3 has said is remotely accurate.

One cool thought expressed by Penrose is the possibility that all matter will eventually decay or annihilate and all that's left will be massless radiation such as photons. If this happens then the concept of space and time itself will cease since from within the reference frame of a photon space and time are undefined.

In this scenario the distinction between an infinitely expanded, cold, and dilute universe and an extremely small, hot, and dense universe becomes undifferentiable. Without any physical scale by which to distinguish the two, the far distant future of our universe where all matter has disappeared can be equivalently viewed as the big bang of a new universe.

This is what Penrose calls conformal cyclic cosmology [1]. There was a time when physicists debated whether the universe would continue expanding forever or whether gravity would eventually halt its expansion and cause it to collapse back in on itself in a Big Crunch, potentially giving rise to another Big Bang. Conformal cyclic cosmology allows for an endless repeating cycle of universes even in the case where the universe expands forever, by identifying the infinitely distant future of one universe with the Big Bang of the next.

This is highly speculative and almost certainly false, but it's at least grounded in actual physics and is kind of poetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology