Special:Badtitle/NS90:Forum:Trope Talk/Do we have a trope for...

...how SF writers have a tendency to incorporate the latest theory, development or gizmo into their new stories as a major plot point? Some examples: HG Wells using germ theory as the key to the defeat of the Martians in War of the Worlds; when the "starbow" (a circular "rainbow" of Doppler-shifted starlight theorized to be visible when one traveled at relativistic speeds) was first proposed in the late 1960s-early 1970s, Frederik Pohl used it as the basis for his 1972 novella "The Gold at the Starbow's End". And I recall a Tom Baker Dr. Who episode where it was a plot-critical discovery that a computer system used bubble memory (for those who don't remember it, an early-1980s variety of non-volatile RAM).

So, do we already have this described somewhere? If so, under what name?