The advantage of MOOCs is that one may study many disciplines with no financial risk.
Thus, in From the Big Bang to Dark Energy, we learned that Dark Energy is the ultimate free lunch. In Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe, Professor Francis said, in a forum post: "It turns out that energy is not necessarily conserved in General Relativity on very large scales." In Algorithms, presented in the Quantum Computation MOOC, it is noted (page 298): "How could microscopic quantum systems of a few hundred atoms contain more information than we can possibly store in the entire classical universe? Surely this is a most extravagant theory about the amount of effort put in by Nature just to keep a tiny system evolving in time."
In Thermodynamics, we see the astonishingly antiquated assumptions of the science: 1) Everything is a continuum, 2) No relativistic effects, 3) No scale effects, 4) No quantum effects. Because of these assumptions, any limits derived from Thermodynamics apply only within a limited range of phenomena. So, Dark Energy violates conservation laws, quantum phenomena contain far more information than we can store classically. The Fluctuation Theorem states "the entropy of an isolated system might spontaneously decrease".
If I had a nickel for every time the Second Law of Thermodynamics is cited in an economic argument I've been in, I could bail out Greece.
Mainstream economics seems to assume a lot, trying to draw support from sciences such as Thermodynamics, to prove a fundamentally mean-spirited ideology in which disciplining others is required. I think we shold revisit the assumptions, especially in the light of new discoveries by science.
