So for a moment, ever so briefly, as a youth, before I knew what hypothetical even meant, I considered the creationist view in Genesis (which, btw, I found out later was one of the last chapters written in the OT). [p.s. Heads up on "Deo Vindice."]
Then I became a minor fan of things that fall out of the sky - polycrystalline black diamonds (a.k.a. carbonado). When you want to carbon date these things, you can't. They are too old. They predate creation. Here's one, now.
You might want to click on the above picture for a closer look.Besides Carbon (which is abundant throughout the universe) there are other elements inside. What you might want to do to date the carbon and captured gasses is just BLAST some of that stuff out of the black diamond using a very high speed focused particle beam. You know, a 600 microsecond long proton beam at 100 Million electron Volts should do the trick. Then all that vaporized material in the ejected tiny plasma cloud could be quickly analyzed inside the target chamber and an estimation of the age of aggregation could be made. Well, there is a pin hole 'entrance wound' and a real blast of an exit wound.
Proton Beam Entrance Hole (above).
Proton Beam / Carbon + Hydrogen Plasma Exit Hole (above). [Ouch!]Well, that little gem (which could have ended up no more than a puff of vaporized dust (had the beam struck a slightly different spot) is somewhere between 5 billion and 5.2 billion years old. That's 5.1 bya +/- 100 million years within a certainty of 97.5% - for those who care. I care. I like it - it is physical evidence that the old boys who composed the two creation myths in Genesis 1 & 2 were just spinning a bedtime yarn. And that certainly works for me. Zzzzzzzzzzz....
Here's a detail of that little hole for the optically challenged.
Click on above picture for bigger view.
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