WHENEVER the Review passes along a story about a new invention that challenges conventional assumptions about how the world is run, it gets letters from readers challenging our assumptions about what news we pass along.

One of the pleasures of editing this journal is that its readers are exceptionally intelligent about a variety of things. For example, I am particularly careful about what we publish about airplanes because - for reasons best known by the doyens of media demographics - the Review seems to attract people well informed on the principles of aerodynamics. We have also have physicists, chemists, experts on medical imaging, theologians, accountants and so forth. . .

But part of intelligence is being hospitable to the new, the possibility that old theories may be wrong, and the understanding that even the best paradigms can fall into disrepair. The Review tries to deal with this with a mixture of skepticism and receptivity.

Some of our readers don't like this and we get letters along the lines of "Oh Sam, you don't really believe that, do you?" The answer is, "No, I don't believe that, at least not yet, but it sure is interesting." This strikes me as a more healthy - even intellectual approach - then to argue that something couldn't possibly work because it never has before. Remember: the reason we have inventions is because someone thought of something for the first time.

I admit a bias that dates back to childhood. Too many hours reading Popular Mechanics and dreaming of the car I was going to have with folding wings from which I could quickly exit any traffic jam in America. I don't have that car but I don't for a minute regret having imagined it.

My father - though by trade a lawyer and businessman - was always tinkering with the possible. He designed a proto-cruise control for our car that was installed by a local mechanic and probably kept all of us in a perpetual state of risk. My older cousin Mitch Hastings invented an FM car radio and, as a young boy, I would drive around with my father and Hastings adjusting the wires under the dash as needed. Earlier, my father had introduced FM stereo broadcasting to Philadelphia. He brought the first wood chipper and the first round hay baler to the state of Maine. But I also know that he ruined my mother's vacuum cleaner trying to remove the air from a silo he made out of black plastic. In my family you didn't expect everything to work; you just expected to keep trying.

A story in the NY Times on America's loss of inventiveness begins this way:

"When James E. West was 8 years old, he propped himself on his bed's brass footboard one afternoon and stretched to plug the cord of a radio he had repaired into a ceiling outlet. It was one of his first experiments. Mr. West's hand sealed to the light socket as 120 volts of electricity shimmied through his body, freezing him in place until his brother knocked him from the footboard and onto the floor. Like more storied inventors who preceded him, he was quickly hooked on the juice - even as he lay shivering from that first encounter. . . Over the past several decades, he has secured 50 domestic and more than 200 foreign patents on inventions relating to his pioneering explorations of electrically charged materials and recording devices. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, an organization in Akron, Ohio, that counts Mr. West among its inductees, about 90 percent of all microphones used today in devices like cell phones, acoustic equipment and toys derive from electronic transducers that he helped to develop in the early 1960's."

We live in a time that treasures rationalism, logic, and the assumption that if we follow the assigned order of things in the assigned way, everything will work out. In fact, that isn't the way life works at all. Some of the best things in life come through serendipity, a taste for repeated failure, and a refusal to believe what everyone else does.

This is where inventors come from. They often don't get the best grades because they have so little inclination to follow the rules. They just come up with the some of the best ideas.

So when the Review runs an article about a possible new source of energy and it get letters accusing the inventors of being con men, it doesn't surprise me to read in the Times that America is losing its inventive edge. We can't all be inventors, but we can, however, at least be nice to them.

For example, the Review got this sort of derogatory mail after running a piece about a Harvard doctor's proposed new energy source. It was not the idea itself that had caught our eye, but the fact that the story had been written by the science editor of the high respectable Guardian, and that it reported two public utilities and a Wall Street firm both interested in the project. If we were being conned we were in some interesting company.

This is the sort of story that most American media ignore because they don't want to be accused of having been misled.

But the Review doesn't mind being wrong because if it were as perfect as much of American journalism pretends to be it would not only be, in truth, much more wrong, it would also be conning the reader. We only claim that our average is pretty damn good.

The search for truth, like the search for a new energy source, is an imperfect business. In both cases, this journal can only bring you news only of that search. The final answer will have to wait for now.