Dr. Becky Science Videos and the Mystery of Dark Matter

There are vast numbers of people of varying qualification explaining science news on YouTube. Especially astro-physics, which attracts more laymen attention than, say, molecular biology.

Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford who goes by "Dr. Becky" (because of course she does), has blasted right by all of them. When a given piece of astronomy news hits, all the YouTubers cover it, but Dr. Becky's channel inevitably produces terser, cleaner, clearer, saner treatment. And her graphics and charts are beautifully selected.

Those eyeballs don't glue themselves, however, so Dr. Becky compensates for lack of clickbait hyperbole via general exuberance and cuteness (every video is followed by a blooper reel where, tee-hee, she mispronounces, like, Chandrasekhar or nucleosynthesis).

Me, I disregard the spoonful of sugar and go straight for the medicine. It's great to have astrophysics news directly from someone in that community. You can really get a sense of the momentary consensus.

To bury the lead, it's impossible to overstate the importance of dark matter as a scientific mystery. A mere 5% of the universe is composed of material we've observed or theorized. The rest of it...who knows?

We're working like gangbusters to figure it out, but you can't exactly stay abreast of news because there is no news, per se. We know literally nothing about dark matter because it's only inferred. If your husband often comes home late from work but his office phone line pepetually goes to voicemail at 5pm, you can be reasonably certain there's another woman...but only as a theoretical notion, not an actual person. It's exactly like that.

Dark matter represents a scientific crossroads that will be remembered as long as there are humans to remember. It's a much higher-level mystery than the rest. It's worth taking your vitamins and losing a few pounds to improve your odds of finding out in this lifetime.

Naturally, a splinter group has arisen to insist that dark matter is not real, and that it's just that we fundamentally misunderstand gravity. They propose that gravity, unlike other basic physics laws, varies in different circumstances, and they're hellbent on finding anomalous gravity situations, each of which sparks headlines about the death of dark matter.

The leading cadre are the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) supporters, who apparently just got a boost from some strange gravitational lensing results, as explained by another YouTuber, Sabine Hossenfelder (who at this point is more science explainer than scientist, and she was never directly connected to astrophysics). Dr. Becky hasn't covered the gravitational lensing paper, so I suspect Hossenfelder's enthusiasm was premature. But we'll see. I'm MOND skeptical, but nobody is dismissing it out of hand.

Two Dr. Becky videos to get you started:
How do we know how much dark matter there is in the Universe? - a great 16 minute tutorial to bring you up to date.

The search for dark matter on Jupiter - an extremely kooky proposition, since dark matter is normally assumed to be way out there, and certainly not in our neighborhood.