[JenB]

Yep! Robotics, psychohistory, waldoes, waterbeds, nuclear-powered spaceships, L5 colonies, weather control, interesting applications of quantum theory... put it this way; scientists might think up ways to maybe kill a cat, but an SF writer would try it, just to see what would happen. Incidentally, what would happen if someone tried that Schroedinger experiment? I think it would be interesting to find out. It might destroy space-time as we know it.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Communications satellites, PCs, virtual reality, even the Internet. I learned about Orion spaceships by reading Niven & Pournelle's Footfall (Michael taking off after the alien spaceship is still one of my favorite sequences in SF... Corin, if Footfall isn't on your reading list yet it should be!) I learned that the vacuum of space can be survived for short periods of time by reading SF. Even the inventions and ideas that SF authors don't originate, they bring into the mainstream by featuring in their stories

what would happen if someone tried that Schroedinger experiment?

Heinlein featured Schoedinger's cat in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls.