Planck found dust polarization reaching 20 percent in the diffuse sky, demanding near-perfect grain alignment, then collapsing steeply with column density in the polarization holes, faster than aligning-photon loss explains (Planck 2015; Ritacco 2025). The repairs, field tangling and grain growth, are tuned to the data they explain.
Radiative torque theory makes alignment a local computation: photons spin grains up, fields orient them, and polarization follows from local radiation, density, and field order. A sky that is too aligned where diffuse and too disordered where dense says the alignment inventory is missing a term that does not scale with local conditions.
SCT adds the missing term: inheritance, in both the rotation and the population. The diffuse end first: grains carry an inherited component in their rotation distribution, the J ladder reaching the smallest condensed bodies (P31, P32, the AME reading at recid 190), and where the inherited axes share the large-scale architecture's order, alignment arrives partly pre-organized, supporting the unexpected 20 percent maximum without demanding that local torques do all the work. The dense end second: cloud interiors are where inherited population diversity stacks deepest, grain size distributions and compositions varying with the deposited material's history (P25), so the alignable population itself changes with depth, steepening the polarization collapse beyond what photon-loss alone produces, with no coagulation model tuned after the fact.
The two surprises stop pulling opposite directions: one inherited term raises the diffuse ceiling and deepens the dense holes, because order and diversity are both things deposits carry. The registered discriminant is the familiar family one: polarization-fraction residuals, after the best local RAT prediction, should correlate spatially with the other inherited-medium signatures, the AME residuals (recid 190), the depolarization map (recid 203), and the larger-scale field architecture, one heterogeneous medium read through a fourth instrument. The inheritance mechanics are in Paper 4, From Chaos To Collisothermal Cosmogenesis, with the ladder in Paper 5, From Chaos To Corotating Hierarchies.
Keystone economy: P32 pre-organizes the diffuse sky, P25 diversifies the dense clouds.
The registered kill: if refined RAT physics, with independently constrained grain growth and beam-scale field mapping from facilities like SO and CCAT, reproduces both the 20 percent maximum and the polarization-hole steepness from local parameters alone, the inherited term is unnecessary. SCT separately requires the residual correlations across the foreground family; a dust-polarization residual map independent of the AME and depolarization residuals would break the one-medium diagnosis.