On age of the universe

A rather beaten topic of j blogger controversy, now it's caught attention of the down to Earth crowd who are demanding answers. Disappointment by the meager weight of R' Arye Kaplan's work on the subject and its inconclusiveness, naturally our oyfgekleter yungeleit would like to know : What Gives ?

The simple answer to this is, of course, age old "RTHM". It's all in there, for those following advice of the forefathers ("Разуй глаза, мудило" et cetera).

But really, those who choose to attack yiddishkeit using this as an argument are usually either misinformed, biased or blatantly ignorant. Even if we put aside the fact that it's our Sages and our sources who pioneered many - dozens and dozens - fundamental concepts that the world is just coming to understand via rigorous and scientific means (concepts that were usually discarded by the lesser brains as "stam agaddata") - dealing with curvitude of space-time, the fundamental property of light and importance of its propagation speed, measuring of vast distances with "years" and such - putting all that aside, question that still remains is how do we fit 5768 years sinse creation with the observable physical "reality".

To address this properly one could delve, foremost, into ontological relativity - and from there on using heavy tools like Quine and Tarski - take the question apart. But that would be boring and counterproductive for some intended purposes.

One could also [ab]use lighter, more versatile and more practical instruments. First that comes to mind, of course, is relativity. Just the basics of it, mind you. We could pose a relatively trivial question - assuming that

1. speed of light is more-less constant; and
2. Minkovski did a good job describing our world with three spatial and one temporal coordinate

question is - given that _we_ observe the Age of Universe to be a period of X (13.73 is a consensus figure, I hear) billion years, how does an Observer B have to move and where would Observer B be positioned to have the 5678 year period meaningfully correspond to the X billion years ?

Just by applying basic Lorenz transformation formulas, and by adding a few more assumption, we can start producing mind-shattering results.

For someone right at the Edge of the Universe (as per wikipedia, 4.6e10 light years away from Earth) and moving at the speed equal to about 28.6% of speed of light (very reasonable speed for someone right at the edge) would be celebrating a very real 5768 Rosh haShana right about now, having celebrated first or second one about 13.729 billion years ago in our days.

Someone a lot closer - just one billion years away - could do the same by stepping on the gas pedal, all the way to 80.8% of the speed of light.

There are many, many more ways to slice it; I'm sure that someone who actually knows something about the subject can show real wonders. Call it curve fitting or kiruv, but there are just so many ways to approach the numbers that the real question is where to draw the line. But no informed person, in their right mind and without agenda, would use the "primitiveness" of the age of the universe against Judaism. Nobody, that is, except some of ours.