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Origin of the old barometer story

On Tue, 23 May 2000 19:33:45 -0400 Judy Gardner
<judygard@TAMPABAY.RR.COM> writes:
My Mom says it sounds more like Richard P Feynman; is this story about
65 years old?


The story is probably more than 65 years old...Maybe even back to the
days of
Torricelli (1609-1647).

By the way, Judy... you wrote that the defendant knocked on the door
of the janitor and said that he would give the janitor a lovely barometer
if
the janitor would tell him the height of his building. The question
that I have
for you now is ...... "Who, or what, and how old, is a janitor?"

Herb Gottlieb from New York City
(Where we now have lots of building custodian engineers and
apartment house caretakers..... but janitors ? ? ? )






Thank you Lisa Gardner (age 9)


I believe this has come through before. It's an old, but
good, story,
but I don't think that it had anything to do with Bohr. In the
first
place, that wasn't Bohr's style. While Bohr was noted to have a
good
sense of humor, he was a serious student and it isn't likely that
he
would have played those kind of games with his professors, whom he
respected greatly and who would not have been amused in that day
and
age. furthermore, if it were true and as widely known as making a
joke about it would imply, it would almost certainly be repeated
in
one or more of his many biographies, and I do not think that it
is.

It's a good story, and it makes some important points about "out
of
the box" thinking, and I like to tell it to my physics
classes, but I
don't think Bohr was the student.

Hugh

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to,
Windows because they
have to..
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