The story about the barometer is wonderful, but almost surely apocryphal, at
least as it applies to Bohr. Rutherford was Bohr's postdoctoral mentor, at
Manchester, shortly before the war: Bohr had earned a doctorate on Planck's
theory before coming to England to work with Thomson at Cambridge, but he
didn't get on well with Thomson so he moved on. I just can't imagine
anything of this kind happening. However, I would offer the highly
speculative hypothesis that perhaps Bohr himself told this story, which he
knew that anyone close to physics would recognize as a pure joke. He was
well known for his sense of humor.
Ted Davis
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