Which brings to mind Frank Herbert’s The White Plague. And I’m reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth which is a slew of life sciences rather than physics.
H. Beam Piper’s short story “Omnilingual” is about archaeology, chemistry, and linguistics.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosiganverse novels are about psychology, mostly. A Civil Campaign also emphasizes entomology. (The latter is also the driving force in “The Man Who Liked Ants”, a short story about the Saint by Leslie Chateris.) While I haven’t read the book, I suspect Chuck Wendig’s story “Invasive” is mostly about entomology as well, and ecology.
Sarah Gailey’s novel River of Teeth is about ecology. (Hippos as an invasive species in the southern U.S.)
David Brin’s novel Glory Season is about physiology and sociology.
Hal Clement basically invented rigorous scientific extrapolation*; his Mission of Gravity deals with gravitation. The Nitrogen Fix is about chemistry.
All of his work was known for his detailed world building.
*Jules Verne did something similar, but his stories weren’t as scientifically accurate; Hal wouldn’t have shot a cannon shell to the moon.
Ready Player One is about video gaming.
Most of Ursula LeGuin’s stories have a firm grounding in anthropology, sociology and ethnology.
I wouldn’t actually say that Mission of Gravity is about gravitation. It’s more about physiology. Gravity is just the backdrop, so to speak: The really heavy lifting is in describing how life could actually work in that environment.
Though I suppose that, to be fair, he also puts in some explanation for how a solid planet could exist with such high surface gravity.
Despite Clement’s efforts, such a large planet is fantastically implausible.
Maybe her Dadbrought a lot of his work home when she was a child?
Le Guin’s meticulously observed societies are what makes her work so rewarding for me.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a virtual primer on Cryptography and how code-breaking led to the invention of computers. Alan Turing even appears as a character.