Actually, the cooling rates for white dwarfs are EXTREMELY well established because, like all other matter in the Universe that has a temperature at all (and Universally, that temperature is, on average, 2.7 degrees Kelvin) cools at a rate determined by their black body spectra. White dwarfs cool at a rate that can be determined by watching the coil on electric stove cool in a vacuum, as they behave exactly the same way. If the determination of the oldest white dwarf's age is said to be 13 or 14 billion years, then the Universe HAS to be greater, because the stars couldn't have been there before the Universe began.

Now about the relativity issue, you bring up. When Einstein first began to think about Relativity, he asked himself the question "What would it be like to ride a beam of light?" One of the things that has actually been OBSERVED, not theorized, is that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the observer. By your logic, one should be able to travel at 80% of the speed of light, shine a flashlight in front of you, and see the light come out at 20% of the "normal" speed of light. This is absolutely not the case. The light would still be travelling at the speed of light, since there is only one speed light can go (in a vacuum, we're not talking materials here)

Also, the light that you say is "assumed to be travelling for 13 billion years" is not at all assumed to be travelling that long. 13 billion years is at the extreme edge, possibly beyond the abilities of currrent astronomical observational techniques. The white dwarf observations that were used to find the "age" of the Universe were relatively close by in cosmological terms. They were actually in a galaxy in the Virgo cluster. Astronomers were not measuring their distances, those can be determined rather accurately for "close" distances through parallax. Astronomers didn't even have to KNOW the distances to those stars to take these measurements, even though they did. All they had to do was find the absolutely dimmest white dwarfs they could, figure out their absolute magnitude, and use that to determine how long they had been cooling. Stellar evolution is a mature science these days, and we know a lot about them.

Finally, yes, energy is indestructible. It can also be exchanged for matter (E=mc^2). so energy is matter. The Big Bang theory does not discount this. It states that at one time all of the Energy in the Universe was condensed into some unknown form, and then it expanded, and still is. All of the ENERGY was and is still there, it is just spread out over a much larger space. The cosmic background radiation, which was first detected BY ACCIDENT, and not because scientists were looking for it at all, shows a uniform distribution of low energy microwave radiation at the extreme red-shift end of the spectrum. If a Universal explosion had occured however long ago, as the photons cooled, they would retain some of their original energy (black bodies). THey would also exist uniformly no matter what direction you looked for them, and they do. A theory like the big Bang couldn't be explained by a better Universal artifact than that.

The Big Bang theory was not desperately conjured, as you state. It was, in fact, derived purely from an implication of Relativity theory. If the Big Bang is wrong, then there is a problem with Relativity, and Einstein knew that when he wrote the thing down. He tried to fudge it and do exactly what you are doing, find a way to make the Universe static and eternal. A few years later, Hubble observed that variable stars that exhibited the same luminosity curves were red-shifted uniformly no matter where in the sky he looked for them. Red shift only accurs when something is moving away at high speed. If these stars are all moving away from the Earth, that either means that the earth is at the exact center of the known Universe (unlikely as all hell), or the actual space making up the whole Universe is expanding at some constantly proportional rate. When Einstein saw this observational evidence, he took out the constant he had added, and Relativity matched perfectly with these observations. Big Bang theory was the best explanation, and still is. Most rational scientists understand this. Yes there are competing theories, but they all require energy to be continually created by the Universe, which you have already objected to.

I could go deeper into your analysis, and I will, step by step, if you would like me to. THe nature of scientific investigation is to be skeptical, and for that you have my commendations. It is not true to the nature of science to ignore what is around you, what has been seen time and time again by others, and what matches beautifully with theory, just because it sounds wrong to you.

nathan