Hi Nick

Woolfson's ideas are unorthodox but I'd argue they're less junk than what's passed off as nebula theory. Fact is there's a lot not understood in cosmogony, lots of arm-waving and lots of simulations that fudge missing features. These are not evidence that the orthodox is wrong or ill-founded, just that it is orthodox more for historical and asthetic reasons than evidential ones. Woolfson's been working on the Capture scenario since before the condensation sequence caused a resurgence in Nebula theory. That that particular concept has been abandoned, but the Nebula lives on, is due to the rise of accretion simulations even if no one has demonstrated a convincing path from dust to planetesimals yet.

Chief thing poorly understood in the Nebula theory is the transfer of angular momentum from a supposedly fast rotating Sun to the disk. Magnetic effects might've played a role but that's still a work in progress not a certainty.

Associated with the momentum transfer problem is the off-set between the Sun's spin axis and the planets' - which is hard to do, if not impossible, if the nebula gained angular momentum from the Sun. The Capture theory is dualistic - there's no need for momentum exchange between the Sun and planets. But how did they get nearly aligned? Because the Sun also captured a disk of dust and the planets were circularised in their orbits by it. Woolfson and Dormand have successfully modelled that process.

And, no, Woolfson isn't into the expanding earth. That was my abuse of his ideas alone.

Adam