Can A Determined Age of the Universe be Called a "Universal Truth"

From Science News v. 166, 7/31/04, p.69

The Article "Universal Truths: Distant quasars reveal content, age of universe" describes a report that studied light from quasars, 3,000 of them (!), using absorption effects to deduce the presence of dust and gasses between them and earth, thus deriving a picture of the structure of the universe out to 8-10 billion light-years away.

The researchers claim "they have pinned down the age of the universe to an accuracy 5 times greater than ever before. By their reckoning, the cosmos is 13.6 billion years old, give or take 200 million years."The study is also claimed to "uphold a leading model of cosmic evolution known as inflation" in that the distribution of matter matches the predictions of the theory.

Since the theory was cobbled up to explain why the distribution of matter in the universe didn't fit the Big Bang theory as it then existed, I can't help but wonder if there isn't a bit of circularity here.

The study also places "the tightest limits to date on the mass of ...neutrinos," which once were thought to be entirely massless, and "eliminates the possibility of an additional family of massive neutrinos which some particle physics experiments have suggested."

It also indicates that the "density of dark energy...is constant over time" and "serves as the best available signpost for dark matter." I'm sure there will be more interesting developments as further studies are conducted.

Until Next Time,
David Bump