Its untrue that philosophical debates about abstruse matters do not affect other fields.
To take one example, the debate about the reality of universals, which dates from antiquity, informed Bouwers intuitionism/constructivism which is one species of nominalism. This led something of an undercover existence apart from the mainstream as Cantorian Set Theory was adopted by the mainstream mathematical community under the aegis of Hilbert. Its only recently that its made its presence more visible with Topos Theory.
Nagarjuna & Hegel were taking quite seriously the idea that there can be true contradictions. Again very recently one has idea that paraconsistent logics can be taken seriosly by removing 'explosion' from classical logic.
As for quanta, the originary story in the history of science, was the discovery of the solution by Plank of black-body radiation by allowing energy to be quantised, that is to come in discrete sizes. The change of language in particular hides what actually has been done, which is to think of energy atomically, in the sense of Democritus.
Of course the work of Democritus was also significant in Newton theory of light, where he introduced the idea of corpuscular light which fixed an inconsistenct in Democritus theory of light - as he didn't consider them atomically.
The Universal Theory of Gravitation that Newton discovered had a huge philosophic hole which is how was force transmitted. It was this reason, amongst others that one can see that the idea of aether that was postulated by Aristotle was pressed into service as the medium that carried this force. As mechanics was the supreme science then, it was given certain mechanical properties. It was only when Einstein discovered that it was the very fabric of space-time that transmitted the force of gravity that one can see that this idea of the aether was seen to be wrong. Except of course that this is not quite right - Aristotle was quite right in postulating the existence of the aether as an element distinct in nature from the other four classsical elements, but he hadn't understood its true nature, and the later physicists post-Newton following Aristotle were also correct in doing so. It was Einstein that identified space-time itself as the aether that physicists had postulated all along. Space-time itself was a substance, a kind of element.
why not help clarify some modern scientific debates—-say, about quantum computing, or string theory, or the black-hole firewall problem, ones where we don’t already know how everything turns out?
Isn't that what quantum computing practitioners or string theorists doing already? Or should be doing - or do they need more help?
Every discipline has its own character, its own subject-matter, and its own tradition. It seems to me that one general distiction between philosophy and the sciences, and this probably goes for most of the humanities, is that the original text matters much more in the humanties. One does not go back and read the Principia Mathematica, whereas one is expected to read King Lear in the rginal Shakespearian Language, or Beowulf in Old English, or Platos dialogues. One might say Science progresses by papers. And humanities by books.
