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Added two reviews in the post above. What I heard as student was, I believe, from a textbook related to bioenergetics, but I cannot recall the title (too long ago, likely in German). I only remember because it was fairly counter-intuitive, considering what was taught in high school. But considering what I learned about cellular efficiency since then, it makes a lot of sense. Here are the abstracts from the links above:

Free electrons can’t absorb photons; you can’t conserve both momentum and energy if that were to happen. They scatter photons, giving you a lower-energy photon. (Compton scattering) You can absorb a photon in the photoelectric effect because the atom is there to let you conserve momentum. But: acceleration of electrons with light has been done, in various ways https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55472-5 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/106

Self-made means you did it yourself, with minimal outside help. Not just help from parents. It suggests that anyone can do it if they just work hard enough. There’s a baseline of support that anyone can get, but most uber-wealthy get far more than that, such as subsidies or tax breaks for individuals or companies not available to the average person. If someone hands you a million dollars and you can parlay that into a bigger fortune, good for you. But since most people don’t have access to a million dollars, it’s a tad insulting to imply that it’s a path to wealth accessible to all.

Or you were simply wrong to conflate a private salary from the government with subsidies, tax breaks, and other economic incentives Elon Musk got from the government. I'm going to go with that rather than chase this red herring.

Yes I've met a couple such millionaires, down in the low millions. Their main form of high-rolling seemed to be in occasional purchase of experiences (overseas trips, cruises, private lessons) rather than material items. Technically I'm down at the low end of that category, with a fairly minimalist life that does allow the occasional splurge. When someone asks me how someone on a modest salary such as mine could have accumulated over a million, I can only point out that the DIY personality can unleash a fair amount of invisible thrift. I recently replaced a fair amount of house circuits and the main breaker panel, which would have come with a price tag of around $4000, and deprived me of the hands-on fun. And the other tip is the one that Warren Buffett workshops will empty your wallet to share with you, which is keep debt at zero. Buy nothing on credit. And, full disclosure: I'm a beneficiary of generational wealth, in the sense that support from middle class parents meant that I could get a decent education and not rack up early debt that would have gnawed away at my earnings for many years. Many are not so lucky. As @dimreepr points out, an initial boost from parents in providing capital makes a huge difference. And a good axe, yes. 🙂

That chloroplasts were using these wavelengths was news to me, as well. One of those facts which, once you are aware of it, everything makes more sense. Especially in how foliage is optimizing its absorption within a shaded canopy where it needs to make the most of whatever light is getting through. Nature finds a way. A plus one to Charon for bringing this...to light.

Or in neighborhoods that don't necessarily reflect their income. I read The Millionaire Next Door quite a while back, and the folks they talked about were as close to self made as I can imagine. They lived in modest homes in modest neighborhoods, bought clothes on sale off the rack, drank beer instead of champagne, and basically avoided most of the extravagant behavior many wealthy folks indulge in. But most of the folks in that book were worth between a few million up to thirty or forty million iirc, nowhere near billionaire status.

Indeed, the hermit has the strongest claim to the title, but even they need, at least a good ax, not easy to get without some help. Anyone, who claims to be self made are just deluded. My mate thinks he is, he just forgets that he grew up in a council house and was educated in a state school, he also forgets that his parent's went on to buy that house, at a huge discount, from the state, and the profit from that inheritance, funded your building company and the tax benifits therein, also given by the state; and you think you're self-made, mate keep taking the pills you get from the chemist...🙄

This is an extremely poor argument, especially in the context of racism. Are you arguing that if folks respected racist opinion more, folks would somehow be less racist? We see how well that works under Trump and other reactionaries. Also it seems that you have no idea what happened in the 2000s. The issue around that time was a massive effort by evangelists to influence science teaching in the US by trying to put creationist view next to evolutionary science. At that point folks atheists, including Dawkins became fairly vocal to resist such influence to diminish science teachings and putting belief over facts. Still no idea how the various thoughts on Dawkins, cancel culture, racism and whatever has been brought up by OP connect, though.

! Moderator Note And the place to talk about that is in its own thread in Speculations, not in someone else's speculative thread.

There is one thing that always strikes me as odd and where the cancer analogy might fail a bit (though it depends on the level of detail). Often, in the discourse anything in the autism spectrum is set apart from the "normal" population, in part using quantitative measures. This of course requires to set a normative standard and to complicated things, the measures within the spectrum categorization are notoriously hetereogenous. There are attempts to better characterize individuals to better understand population heterogeneity without pre-assumption of what is normal, which, in my mind, would be a better approach to try to identify categories. There of course challenges to this approach and in the area of medicine it has been sought after for so long that in the academic community folks have rebranded it multiple times to keep it relevant (and I have been long enough around to recognize the same argument, even if the newer generation think that they discovered it for the first time). Many of these terms (personalized medicine, precision medicine, normative modeling) fundamentally recognize the heterogeneity within a population and seeks to find the level of detail to provide better diagnoses or treatment, if necessary. It also tries not to predefine categories by being more data-driven. Obviously, it is also way more challenging and the current flavour of research is to add machine learning or AI to it.

It won’t work. Firstly, thermal energy is divided between different degrees of freedom, only some of which are vibrations, the others being translations and rotations. Secondly, where vibrations are involved, different substances have different characteristic frequencies of vibration. Temperature, on the other hand, is proportional to the total thermal kinetic energy of an object, regardless of what substance it consists of, or what physical state it is in.

I am fully aware this is a philosophical approach to physics, but requiring evidence? We are in the "Speculations" forum! And I am truly grateful for the debate. Thanks

So your post is actually an accusation of many crimes on both sides, if the government builds someone else's factories with government money, so it's fraud.... Did you come to the FBI with your claim of a crime being committed by the government and a private company? If they build a factory for $1B and sell it for, say, $2B to a private company, they will make $1B. So the whole construction of the factory was an investment.

"Self-made millionaire" means that someone did not get millions from his parents. Heritage them. "Self-made billionaire" means that someone doesn't get billionaires from his parents. And that's it. The real way to get millions or billions is under the rug, which you don't have access to. Now you (plural) came up with a new definition that self-made billionaire cannot get money from anybody else or government.. They how can they get it otherwise? Or how can you get any money? You (scientists) depend on government subsidies the most... I bet Elon would survive collapse of government subsidies.. unlike a regular scientist who rely on it on a daily basis.. The whole thread is bizarre for me.. as it is about semantics.. A long before Elon even imagined anything he had milllions from selling PayPal..