Because if there were, it would be a solid object, not a cloud. Even water doesn’t react to gravity as a solid object does. Works for us because it gives us tides.
Sounds to me like he says our ignorance would have led us to the wrong conclusions had we not known better…
Give it time.
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Multiple objects, be they atoms or kindergarten blocks, have a single net, as in combined and not a fisherman’s, center of gravity. If we are talking about something fluid, and gases are fluid, that center may be constantly moving, but it still exists.
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As I said, time and chance, the gods of naturalism. Never gonna happen. In time, those clouds will dissipate, like those here after the rain.
It’s also not concentrated. A cloud’s gravity is dispersed throughout, just like the gases in it. Any solid object, gas giant or star has a discrete center. Science can describe them, but not adequately explain them, much less how they formed.
I am dumbfounded.
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I’m sorry, Patrick, but that is simply factually untrue. You are demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what a centre of gravity even is.
Every object has a point in which, in every direction, the amount of matter in front of it is the same as the amount of matter behind it. This is as true for gases as it is for solids and liquids. It doesn’t depend on how concentrated or dispersed it is. Yes it may move about, but it still exists. That is the centre of gravity.
No, Patrick, it’s nothing to do with “the gods of naturalism.” It’s simply the laws of physics.
I’m sorry, but once you get onto dismissing the laws of physics as “the gods of naturalism,” you’re demanding the right to make things up and create your own alternate reality. If that’s the line that you’re taking, then further discussion is pointless.
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@Patrick_S has been given the math. And yet more math using different approaches. He has had it explained in lay terms. He has had the flaws in his counter claims revealed. He has had the physics for gas laws and gravitation and fusion corrected. He has been shown actual pictures of nascent stars forming. Through it all he has refused to engage with good faith to any points raised, believing that his evidently high school science is up to the task of taking issue with established astrophysics. Others of more patience and leisure can continue to respond to these inane postings, but I’m out of this thread.
By now I think that even Patrick’s pet cat understands how nebulae collapse to stars. But then, you will never understand what you simply refuse to accept.
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Aye RON, regardless of the peerless Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s education of the American public in science, @Patrick_S helplessly, fecklessly extracts irrationality from what he actually says and means. S&G’s The Boxer was never wrong. Desire is stronger than rationality. America has peerless strengths as a culture. Balanced by egregious weaknesses. God is fair.
Mental confusion of this type is normal, human, a by-product of evolution for small scale natural, including social - tribal - complexity being exposed to factorially increasing social and technical complexity since the neolithic, 5% of our human evolution at most. It takes privileged educational experience and aptitude to transcend it, and even then.
What are you talking about?
How solid is a solid object compared with a cloud?
And certainly there is overlap. If it hurts when it hits you, I would call it a solid, just as a functional definition. 
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Like you do with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s?
She could probably be talked into it. That doesn’t say much for the theory, though.
How strong is that gravitational center when you take into account all forces?
Astronomy professor, Donald DeYoung, said that when typical values of interstellar cloud mass M and temperature T are inserted in the formula, Jeans’ Length is found to be 50-100 times smaller than the average nebular size. [meaning they all should have collapsed long ago. -PS]
He says,
“The conclusion is that stars will not form spontaneously in space since the dominant outward gas force, Fp = (3nRT) / r, will not allow collapse. Instead gas clouds dissipate outward. Furthermore, this simple force comparison ignores the dispersive effects of nebular magnetism, rotation, nonsphericity and turbulence,” from “The Origin of the Universe,” in Design and Origins in Astronomy, 1983, p. 17.
Here we have yet another case of denialism, common to this board, as it is to humanity. I would go as far as to say dominant in both. There may be more rational, analytical, critical voices here for each denialist, but the former can never win.
Denial of reality is to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. It is an irrational action that blocks the validation of history, of empirically verifiable reality, of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject.
The subject here denies centuries of university level astrophysics with failed high school physics, denies natural star formation. That is an uncomfortable truth for them. Just as it is for Turkey that it committed the Armenian genocide. Germany cannot deny the Holocaust because it was conquered, and de- and re-constructed. That’s what it takes. What fascinates me is the evolutionary origin of this behaviour, which seems to be, as I think @Randy has found, the yang to the yin of conspiracist ideation.
A conclusion I came to recently with my wife is that we’re evolved to run broken. We take on enormous individual and synergistically collective psychological damage and still maladaptedly function. I think of Viktor Frankl’s findings in Auschwitz, find a purpose, any one will do. No matter how irrational. That has higher survival value than rationality without purpose.
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That is a good way of thinking about it. If that is somewhere in a formal definition, I have long since forgotten it. 
It is rather astounding that @Patrick_S doesn’t have an intuitive grasp of it.
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@jammycakes already addressed this up in post #382 above.
And the equation he gave there is a valid one - the physics works, and yes - Boyle’s law cannot overcome it in the larger cosmic scales.
A nebula has a typical density of 100 to 10,000 particles per cm^3.
Air at STP is about 10^19 particles per cm^3
Sorry, but I don’t see it happening in space without physical restraints, unless you can overcome the heat problem. Gravity will fail, because the heat causes too much kinetic energy for them to come together. And it only gets words the more you compress the clouds.
On small-enough scales viscosity always becomes important, and the energy is converted into heat, which is kinetic energy on a molecular scale. Turbulence in nebulae has profound, but poorly understood, effects on their energy balance and pressure support.
energy is continuously injected into the gases by a variety of processes. One involves strong stellar winds from hot stars, which are blown off at speeds of thousands of kilometres per second. Another arises from the violently expanding remnants of supernova explosions, which sometimes start at 20,000 km (12,000 miles) per second and gradually slow to typical cloud speeds (10 km [6 miles] per second). A third process is the occasional collision of clouds moving in the overall galactic gravitational potential. All these processes inject energy on large scales that can undergo turbulent cascading to heat.
Gravity is the engine that is generating the heat in the first place. There would have been no extra kinetic energy at all unless gravity first begins to make it. So you’ve got a logical problem here: you want heat to rescue your argument and work with Boyle’s law to “defeat gravity” somehow. But in order for you to have your heat, you would first have to concede that a gas cloud came together in adiabatic compression in the first place. So may I take it then, that you have finally conceded that compression does take place? You can’t have your heat without it. But after you’ve allowed for such compression, then I will say this for your heat: yes - it does help push back against gravity eventually. It would be the reason the sun still has so much gaseous volume still, despite [and yet also because of] its enormous gravitational forces.
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