The Unreasonable Efficiency of Black Holes

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Thanks to https://brilliant.org/minutephysics for sponsoring this video! Check out their black hole course at http://brilliant.org/minutephysicsblackhole Support MinutePhysics on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/minutephysics Link to Patreon Supporters: http://www.minutephysics.com/supporters/ This video is about how efficient various reactions are at converting mass to energy (as we know from the Einstein mass-energy equivalence of E=mc^2). Antimatter is very efficient but it is not naturally-occurring. Chemical reactions like fire or explosions are very inefficient. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are better, but not amazing on an absolute scale. Non-rotating black holes (Schwarzschild) and rotating (Kerr) are by far the most efficient, due to their accretion disks and very small radius of their innermost stable circular orbits. REFERENCES: Periodic Videos Hydrogen Explosion in slow motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTgeeTB_kA CIA World Factbook Norway Energy Consumption: https://web.archive.org/web/20120128032332/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2042rank.html Binding Energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_energy Hydrogen molecular bonding: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/chemistry/5-73-introductory-quantum-mechanics-i-fall-2005/lecture-notes/sec13.pdf Gibbs free energy of water formation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Gibbs_free_energy_of_formation Party Balloon Size Chart: https://broadwaypartyrental.com/wp-content/uploads/HELIUM-BALOON-CHART.pdf Mass Excess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_excess Table of Mass Excesses: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/masses/mass.mas12 Deuterium-Tritium Hydrogen Fusion Energy Released: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((deuterium+atomic+mass)%2B(tritium+atomic+mass)-(helium-4+atomic+mass)-(neutron+mass))%2F((deuterium+atomic+mass)%2B(tritium+atomic+mass)) Hydrogen to Helium Fusion chain efficiency: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4(proton+mass)-(helium+4+atomic+mass))%2F(4(proton+mass)) Uranium-235 fission efficiency: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(neutron+mass%2B(uranium+235+atomic+mass)-(krypton+92+atomic+mass)-(barium+141+atomic+mass)-3(neutron+mass))%2F(neutron+mass%2B(uranium+235+atomic+mass)) Black Hole Accretion rates: http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~garret/teaching/lecture7-2012.pdf MinutePhysics is on twitter - @minutephysics And facebook - http://facebook.com/minutephysics And Google+ (does anyone use this any more?) - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6 Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute! Created by Henry Reich