> 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.