I saw Eternity the other Night...It looked remarkably like the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis

Once Kant had floated the idea (in 1755 already!), nobody could think how else the sun and the planets could have come into being.  Then forty years later Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested a model based on Kant's original intuition which "explained" how the planets revolve around the sun in the same plane and in the same direction in which the sun rotates.  And there, for about a century, the matter rested.

So spake th'Omnipotent, and with his words

All seem'd well pleas'd; all seem'd, but were not all....

Mildly, James Clerk Maxwell, in his 1873 lecture on Molecules, suggested that Laplace's Mécanique Céleste did not well describe the non-accretion of matter in the rings of Saturn.  Other, lesser, later geniuses than Maxwell called this a "severe criticism" of the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis, and set about formulating very much more dynamic--indeed singularly catastrophic--models of the origin of the sun and the planets:  Thus the Jeans Tidal Theory, which proposed that the planets were created by the near collision of the sun and another very massive star.   For a while this seemed to hold, and then criticism mounted from several sources, and the dualistic (!) Jeans' theory gradually fell into disfavor, resulting in the return of a modified version of the nebular hypothesis in the early 1970's. Nowadays, the lunatic exuberance of catastrophism having somewhat abated, four cautious stages are generally proposed in the process of forming planets from nebular disk material:

1.   The dust component of the disk settles into the mean plane.

2.   Planetisimals, solid objects of dimension from hundreds of meters to a few kilometers are                     produced from the dust disk.

3.   The planetisimals collect together to form terrestrial planets and the cores of the major 

        planets.

4.   The cores of the major planets acquire gaseous envelopes from the gas components of the                       disk.