If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me,” wrote the physicist David Mermin in 1989, “it would be ‘Shut up and calculate!’” Mermin followed his summary with a quick rejoinder—“But I won’t shut up.” Yet the phrase “shut up and calculate” took on a life of its own after Mermin set it to paper, and rapidly became the catchphrase of the Copenhagen interpretation among physicists. It was misattributed to Richard Feynman, and eventually even Mermin himself forgot where it came from, only to rediscover, years later, that he was the source of the phrase.
