> It would be interesting to see how hard it would be to walk these models towards general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Definitely. Even more interesting could be seeing them fall into the same trappings of quackery, and come up with things like over the counter lobotomies and colloidal silver.

On a totally different note, this could be very valuable for writing period accurate books and screenplays, games, etc ...

Accurate-ish, let's not forget their tendency to hallucinate.