Circletimessquare writes "Dennis Overbye at the New York Times has some ruminations on some of the historical totems of science going up for auction at Christie's next week. There is the 1543 copy of 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' by Copernicus, which you can have for $900,000 to $1.2 million. If you have some cash left over, maybe you can pick up an unquestionable




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:character
part of speech:noun
definition:a person who is appealingly odd or curious.
oddity




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:first
part of speech:adjective
definition:preceding all othe work by Galileo, Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or Malthus. And then there is the 1878 copy of the world's first phone book: 'a shock of credit — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein's father went into the nascent craft himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the llc.cite this source roget's ii: the new thesaurus for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English rocketer J. J. Thomson discovered what it in truth was ...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Brought to my attention by

Mark