One of the hardest but, I think most important, tricks to pull off is to walk along that very fine line between gullibility and cynicism that is the path of the open mind.

This morning I was listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, while they hosted one of their depressingly contrived seven-minute “heated debates”. This one was about the testing of medicine on animals. In one corner they had Professor Robert Winston (him with the moustache off the telly who whispers about the marvels of life) who was speaking up on behalf of a booklet published today by the Research Defence Society on the benefits of animal testing. And in the other they had Cathy Archibald (her not off the telly at all and with the quavering voice of one not used to being interviewed by Mr Evan “Dragon’s Den” Davies) who was from Europeans’ for Medical Progress.

Rather reasonably and without any of the usual rancour this debate usually stirs up, Cathy argued that there should be a proper and in-depth scientific study into the efficacy of animal testing. She cited a neat case where animal testing had lead to serious delays in the introduction of an effective treatment for cancer because the drug had been highly toxic to dogs, but not for humans. She was willing to be convinced - she supported medical advancement and wasn’t just a cuddly-bunny-hugger - she just thought there should be a proper study. She was a geneticist and had just had her life saved by high-tech drugs - she just wanted a faster route to medical treatments using new testing techniques rather than following the animal research dogma (do you see what I did there?). She even accepted that sometimes animal testing could correlate with human reactions and said wouldn’t oppose animal testing if it could be demonstrated to be more effective than alternatives.

None of which made the slightest impression on Prof Winston who sounded like he’d just got up after a heavy night and who had come prepared for a knife-fight with some ALF thug. He wasn’t going to have any of this namby-pamby stuff about actually weighing the pros and cons. It was a fantastically arrogant performance - those who disagreed with him were “pseudo-scientific” and he talked all over Cathy at one point in the way only a senior medical consultant really can.

Winton’s position is a perfect example of how scientists - in standing up for the “scientific method” can actually be the most dogmatic of groups and amongst those least willing to approach a given subject (especially their own specialism) with an open mind. When I did my degree at Brunel, I was lucky enough to do a course with Steve Woolgar on the sociology of science. Although I was a pretty poor student, it was one of those courses (and he was one of those teachers) that change the way you see the world. Woolgar introduced me to the work of Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon, authors who dissected the scientific method as a social construct and the process of science as a reflection of flows of power. From Woolgar and Latour’s actor network theory I jumped to Foucault’s flow of power in networks and ended up as a sort of a post-structural-empiricist.

I don’t deny the reality of gravity or of Yersinia pestis, and I’m not about to jump out the window or infect myself with bubonic plague to argue the point about truth, but I’m interested in how Newton’s law or medical diagnoses help underpin a social/political/economic structure that insists that only these people organised in precisely these social structures possess the ability to understand and make pronouncements on reality. And everyone else should shut the fuck up.

A closed mind is one problem but the danger of having an open mind is that some people will let anything fall in and get lodged there. I have no time for mysticism (I’ve still enough Marxist materialism in me to see only the physical in the world) or conspiracy theories (our minds evolved to see patterns in nature to help us find food/avoid predators, but that useful trick sometimes stutters and people are left seeing only patterns and never the chaos) except insofar as I think they reflect interestingly on the people who believe in them.

But I do like the idea that big things can happen that can shatter the way we view the world.

The other day I mentioned the Berlin Wall to someone and they looked at me blankly. “The Berlin what?” Too young to remember the Cold War they hardly believed that only a few years ago the big threat in the world wasn’t terrorism but America and Russia pointing enough nuclear ordnance at each other to fry every cockroach on the planet.

But jump in a time machine and travel back just twenty years. If you’d tried to explain how quickly and totally the world would change, you’d have been locked up. Chelsea winning the league? Owned by a Russian billionaire? Piss off mate!

Sometimes science shifts just as dramatically - despite the politburo-style foot-dragging of the great and the good of the scientific community.

Which is why I love wacky science - stuff on the edge (and sometimes slightly over the edge) of reason.

Things like cold fusion. What is interesting about the cold fusion “debate” isn’t whether cold fusion is real or not - I’m not qualified to judge - but the way scientists reacted. Fleischmann and Pons weren’t just criticised for being wrong, they were castigated and ostracised for daring to cross boundaries (they were chemists, not physicists) and their theory was dismissed by many who never bothered to test it because “it couldn’t be right”. Never mind the fact that some attempts to replicate cold fusion found something unexplained (almost certainly not fusion but something that delivered anomalous results) that might explain why Fleischmann and Pons were fooled by their experiments and even though low-level research on the topic continues to suggest something might be there.

I doubt that “cold fusion” is really fusion - though I’d be interested to know what is causing some of the phenomena observed by some groups like the US Navy findings on radioactive traces - but what the argument really demonstrates is despite the pedestal some people put the practice of science on, it really is just a profession like any other, with fads and power structures and turf-battles all ringed around with bureaucracy and propped up with career ladders.

None of this is to deny the benefits of science. I’m a geek. I love science and I’m having none of that back to nature malarkey either - I like living in a world with Wiis and the Internet and missions to Pluto and a vast array of antibiotics - this is undeniably the most extraordinary era to be alive in throughout human history.

But, believing that, one can still point out that the mechanisms and institutions of science are the product of mortal man, and mortal man is incapable of perfection.

So, cynicism and gullibility are equally dangerous. Minds too closed will never break the sclerotic grip of the past. Minds too open will be bankrupted financially and morally.

Which is why I’ve been fascinated by Steorn - the Irish company claiming to have uncovered, by accident, a technology capable of “over unity” - basically a “free energy” or “perpetual motion” device.

Now this is a million times better than cold fusion. This isn’t just a strange reaction in a test tube. This is challenging the very foundations of science. Without thermodynamics, pretty much everything is up for grabs. It’s an enormous claim, and one that probably wasn’t helped town the road to credence by announcing it in a full page advert in The Economist and even further damaged by the failure of the device to operate at its first supposed public demonstration in a London art gallery this month.

Free energy cons are no new thing. There’s a long history of shysters fleecing the gullible with perpetual motion machines so either the guys at Steorn are the most brass-balled hustlers ever to emerge from Dublin (and let’s be clear, there’d be plenty of competition for that title) or they’re the victims of their own gullibility and are about to end up with a lot of egg on their face.

What is interesting about the Steorn case is that it is hard to dismiss it as a straightforward, take the money and run, fraud. For a start Steorn aren’t taking money, they’re spending it. They’re not even building up hype in pursuit of some giant sell-off - again if we believe them - they’re planning to licence the technology on an “open source” model. Nor, if we are to take their word for it, are they going to keep their mystical device secret – instead they (again, if we accept their word) seem to be exploring ways of convincing people, they appear to be trying to find alternative approaches to bypass the scorn of the entrenched scientific community - and that leaves me feeling slightly worried for these guys. Because if they aren’t scammers, if they really believe what they’ve got is real, then even if they’re right (and the chances of that can’t be higher than an ant’s arse) they’ve got a lifetime of battles ahead of them. The best that they can hope for is a lifetime of trying to convince everyone to take their technology seriously - the worst is a lifetime of derision while they try to defend the indefensible or their own stupidity. It’s not the prettiest of alternatives.

And here I start to feel the slightest slitherings of desire.

Wouldn’t it be great if they were right? Of course they can’t be. But wouldn’t it be amazing to be alive at the moment everything changed again? It won’t, obviously. But wouldn’t it be the greatest underdog story in history if some gobbeen from Dublin overturned Newton, science and everything? Thing is, though, that Rocky was just a fairy story.

So I’m not about to invest in perpetual motion machines or cold fusion for that matter, and I’m not suggesting that anyone else should. I’m not going to be gullible. And then again, I’m not just going to shut my mind either. I’m going to watch with interest and see whether what transpires teaches me something interesting about everyone involved.

But it is hard not to wish for the impossible now and then - just to see the giants take a tumble, just for the thrill of the moment when the world turns upside down. And isn’t all of this part of the compulsion in writing and reading sf, so we can experience at least in fiction these rarest of moments, the instants when closed minds fly open and new worlds take shape.