The Nice Model of Solar System Evolution

The Nice model of solar system evolution is a fine example of the sort of theories that come from dogmatic consensus building.

Developed in 2005 through general consensus, it’s a hodgepodge of pre-existing ideas.

It’s also void of any kind of originality.

Consensus building guarantees mediocrity of outcome

This is because consensus building is a way to approach problems that pretty much guarantees mediocrity of outcome.

Anything original is tossed out, and deemed too radical. Only ideas that fit pre-existing notions of how things work are allowed into the consensus. The end result is never anything but an extension of what is already widely believed.

Peer reviews and conferences that aim to build consensus are hindrances to originality. They protect the Status Quo at the expense of diversity.

Debate and rivalry is better than consensus

Instead of consensus, we should encourage the development of widely different theories. Then have rivaling factions defend these theories while pointing out weaknesses in others.

This would produce a large number of theories on any topic. Complete with lists of strengths and weaknesses.

Instead of a single unified theory for everything, we would get many theories. Strengths and weakness would be widely known and accepted as such, and there would be a continuous stream of new and original ways of looking at things.

It would no longer be possible to brush aside inconvenient facts as irrelevant. Weaknesses would be highlighted by opponents, and defenders would have to explain discrepancies between theory and observation.

Debate has been crippled

Consensus building and peer reviews have crippled theoretical science to such an extent that hardly anything new has come to the forefront over the last hundred years.

Scientific work has been limited to tinkering with existing ideas. Anything else is considered fringe and radical. Originality is labeled as pseudo-science with hardly anyone bothering to look beyond the title.

As a result, a number of remarkably weak explanations exist purely because they are considered valid by consensus.

The Nice model being a prime example of this.

The Nice model

This model takes the accretion disk of solar system formation as a given. So, the consensus view is that the early solar system must have been teaming with planets, moons and rocks. Because that’s what an accretion disk would produce.

However, our current solar system isn’t packed with planets and moons. So, something must have cleaned this up to form the solar system as it is today.

Faced with this problem, the consensus is that big planets tossed out smaller ones.

The big ones roamed the solar system until they found their present stable orbits.

Using computer models, scientists worked their way backwards to their hypothetical beginning, and from this they’ve concluded that their model is correct.

A glaring weakness

However, there’s a glaring weakness in this explanation.

No less than 99% of all matter thought to have existed in the early solar system has been ejected.

That leaves us with a mere 1% of the original. Which means that almost everything that was created early on has been ejected into space.

When we combine this with the increasingly popular assumption that our solar system is nothing special, we have to suppose that all stars have undergone similar processes in their past.

They have all thrown 99% of their original mass into space.

Almost all planets ever created are rogue ones. But observations tells us otherwise. Rogue planets, although not unheard of, are not common.

Some may argue that debris from the early solar system was tossed out in all directions, and that the vastness of space makes it possible to have 99% of all planets roaming around without this being noticed.

However, galaxies don’t have huge clouds of debris around them. Rogue planets must therefore be moving in the plane of the galaxy. But this would make encounters with them common.

So, by simple observation, we must conclude that the Nice model is incorrect.

Solar systems are created stable from the start

It’s far more likely that solar systems are created stable from the start. That there never was a violent period of great upheaval some 600 million years ago.

The craters on the moon are not all ancient scars. Most of them are the result of ongoing electrical activity. Only a small number of them are impact craters.

This is not to say that nothing upsetting ever happens in our solar system. Something violent appears to have happened a mere 10,000 years ago. But it was nothing like the Nice model suggests, and things returned to stability in decades rather than millennia.

A powerful mechanism of creation and stability

Mainstream astronomy fails to consider electric forces in their analysis of things. So, their theories are lacking a powerful mechanism for stability.

Conventional thinking has it that things are perpetually unstable, and that processes take millions of years to complete. That’s in stark contrast to Donald Scott’s model where solar systems are created in a matter of days.

But consensus will have it that Donald Scott is a pseudo-scientist. So, we must dismiss his simple explanation in favor of an elaborate tale, where gravity first pulls things together into planets, only to throw 99% of everything back into space.