I was recently involved in a discussion on a sister site regarding how tightly c

Question

I was recently involved in a discussion on a sister site regarding how tightly coupled Physics is with the age of the Universe (and Earth).

I believe that the Earth and the Universe are both billions of years old, but don't know enough on why exactly other than having confidence in peer reviewed science. Moreover, it would be helpful if I knew which parts of physics are tightly coupled with the current age estimate. So,

Are there any notable hypotheses or entire fields of modern physics that both:
do not rely on the age of the Earth for their predictive and explanatory power and
do not predict an old Earth
If so, which fields depend (directly or indirectly) on the age of the Earth, and which do not?

Put differently,

consistent with old Earth = hypotheses that either rely on the age of the Earth for their predictive power or predict an old Earth
M = Modern physics.
Mo = Modern physics consistent with old Earth.
Mn = Hypotheses that both do not rely on the age of the Earth for their predictive power and do not predict an old Earth.

Then M = Mo?Mn. My question is if there are any hypotheses in Mn, or Mn is an empty set?

Explanation / Answer

M0 is all of physics (the serious one); Mn is virtually all of physics, except for cosmology and geophysics (and some other "historical sciences" I don't want to enumerate in too much detail because it's just a matter of terminology and most of them don't naturally belong to physics, anyway).

An overwhelming majority of physics (the Standard Model of particle physics, nuclear physics, atomic physics, biophysics, physical chemistry, optics, electromagnetism, condensed matter physics, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and dozens of others) doesn't rely on the age of the Earth or age of the Universe. Most of physics is concerned with the description of local processes that can be observed in some region and in some relatively short enough period of time. Most of physics extracts observations of local, short-lived processes and objects; and after they're evaluated, it makes statements about the local and short-term behavior of the physical systems, too. Those things don't depend on whether or not the Earth is old or the Universe is old. By this I mean that if we lived in a hypothetical Universe in which the observations of the Earth or the Universe would imply that those entities are much younger, much older, or infinitely old, but the lab experiments would proceed just like in our world, almost all of physics would work just like it does in our world.

With this being said, physics also provides us with the most powerful tools that make it obvious that both the Earth and the Universe are billions of years old

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