In the small world of scientific genius, there are many battles among the geniuses. They often hate one another. Vanity and resentment fuel disagreements that become wildfires. The liberal scientists (most of them) at Los Alamos couldn't take Teller. (He could be obnoxious.)

Here's an example of estimates, though. The Fat Man (Plutonium implosion bomb that would be used on Nagasaki) needed to be tested to see if it worked at all.

First, would it work, then how powerful would it be if it did. Oppenheimer guessed 800 tons of TNT powerful. Teller guessed 20,000 tons. Von Neumann declined a guess. Went off at about 12,000. That was the Trinity test. So the project manager and the eventual father of H-Bomb...

...were off by 11,000 and 8,000 tons, respectively. And the greatest genius among them, von Neumann, didn't place a bet (though his biographer said he probably would have guessed 8,000). Science. Guesses. But the bomb did go off, so there's that.

Tread carefully when approaching these disputes. Scientists are a bunch of mean girls. Newton was a great nut as well as the pre-eminent scientist of early modernity. Einstein was a goofball about politics. Schrodinger and Heisenberg were saying the same thing in different terms.

You want to trust your scientists, but there are two boundaries. The first is are they reasonably right about the science and second is are they talking about something other than science? The first will turn up in the numbers. The second you can get from the man in the street.