Like the Bode-Titius Law before it, the Schmidt Law is not properly understood, given that it has never been reduced to, or predicted from first principles. Star formation is complicated. And, it is almost certainly a multi-scale process that has multiple immediate causes (quiescent, periodic and impulsive in their time dependence; local, global and cosmic/external in their origin) resulting in the same end product: stars. Philosophers of science would say that the theory of star formation is “massively underdetermined by the observations” of stars alone.