More broadly, I don't buy for a second that science fiction doesn't feed back into the minds of scientists and engineers working on the next big thing. It would be strange if it didn't, and I think the burden of proof is on you to show that scientists and engineers are universally exercising the sort of perfect mental hygiene it would take to isolate themselves from the baseless speculations of writers.
> More broadly, I don't buy for a second that science fiction doesn't feed back into the minds of scientists and engineers working on the next big thing. It would be strange if it didn't, and I think the burden of proof is on you to show that scientists and engineers are universally exercising the sort of perfect mental hygiene it would take to isolate themselves from the baseless speculations of writers.
You don't need to isolate yourself. The baseless speculations of writers just don't help in doing science. If you pick any discovery, you'll see that it was a consequence of a lot of work and intuition about a particular area of math, physics, engineering, or biology. Scientists aren't waiting for the next Star Trek episode hoping to find some ideas. The reason is simple: the ideas in science fiction don't work. Almost always what we get is totally different from what was predicted and usually more amazing, and it's shaped by the math/physics/engineering/biology that led us there, not b some outcome we want to match in science fiction. It's just a cognitive bias that you remember good SF predictions and forget bad ones.
This whole Wells atomic bomb business is a prime example. Szilard couldn't possibly get any ideas from Wells. Because Szilard's actual contribution has nothing to do with what Wells wrote. He discovered chain reactions. And how he did so is well documented, by analogy to chemical chain reactions. Literally nothing in Wells would ever help you discover nuclear chain reactions. Nor is it obvious that what Wells wrote requires chain reactions, you can think of other fanciful mechanisms.
As a working physicist I would agree with you for the most part. Science fiction doesn't help because it doesn't contain ideas, which work beyond a surface plausibility level. However you can still get inspired by them in indirect ways. I find Paul Feyerabend's work interesting in that regard. In "Against Method" he argues that most breakthrough scientific discoveries can't be cleanly attributed to the scientific method.
I literally posted a link to what appears to be a letter written by Szilard himself (please correct me if I'm wrong), directly citing Wells' story as inspiration in an account of his own relationship with the genesis of the atomic bomb.
I can't help but notice that you seem to have completely ignored it in the construction of your response. Perhaps you didn't read my comment very thoroughly.
I read it. You should read it carefully too. He says he read a book. He never says it was an inspiration.
Just because I do AI research and tell someone I watched Star Trek, does that mean I'm saying that my latest NeurIPS paper is inspired by Star Trek? No way.
The suggestion that he'd mention it in the very first sentence of an account of how he arrived at the idea for the atomic bomb, when in fact it was totally irrelevant at the time, is absurd on its face; and your analogy is terrible. A better analogy might be somebody asking you how you developed your "latest NeurIPS paper" and you responding by describing a Star Trek episode in which a (superficially) similar technology is used, before even mentioning your own work. And later, perhaps, recounting how you exclaimed Star Trek, here we come! when you had your key insight.
You've overextended your argument, and you know it. There is no use continuing this conversation if you're going to go to such absurd lengths to deny what's obvious.
Like robots, flying cars, space stations, tablets, electric cars, AI...?
Sci-fi lets us set impossible looking goals, until somebody comes up with something similar and practical. I'd give sci-fi more credit for shaping our current world. Writers dream, science builds which I think is a beautiful symbiosis.
More broadly, I don't buy for a second that science fiction doesn't feed back into the minds of scientists and engineers working on the next big thing. It would be strange if it didn't, and I think the burden of proof is on you to show that scientists and engineers are universally exercising the sort of perfect mental hygiene it would take to isolate themselves from the baseless speculations of writers.