What will these vain morons say when Hubble looks 14 billion years into the past? Then 15 billion? Oops?
As long as I can remember, the estimated age of the Universe has bounced around from one number to another -- I remember it as once being 25 billion years old. Lately it seems to have settled down around 14 billion years:
"The age of the universe based on the "best fit" to WMAP data "only" is 13.69±0.13 Ga (the slightly higher number of 13.73 includes some other data mixed in). This number represents the first accurate "direct" measurement of the age of the universe (other methods typically involve Hubble's law and age of the oldest stars in globular clusters, etc)...""The first reasonably accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the Universe, a numerical value now known as the Hubble constant, was made in 1958 by astronomer Allan Sandage. His measured value for the Hubble constant yielded the first good estimate of the age of the Universe, coming very close to the value range generally accepted today.
"However Sandage, like Einstein, did not believe his own results at the time of discovery. His value for the age of the Universe was too short to reconcile with the 25 billion year age estimated at that time for the oldest known stars.
"Sandage and other astronomers repeated these measurements numerous times, attempting to reduce the Hubble constant and thus increase the resulting age for the Universe. Sandage even proposed new theories of cosmogony to explain this discrepancy.
"This issue was finally resolved by improvements in the theoretical models used for estimating the ages of stars. Presently, using these new models for stellar evolution, the estimated age of the oldest known star is about 13.2 billion years.
"The discovery of microwave cosmic background radiation announced in 1965 finally brought an effective end to the remaining scientific uncertainty over the expanding Universe.
"The space probe WMAP, launched in 2001, produced data that determines the Hubble constant and the age of the Universe independent of galaxy distances, removing the largest source of error."