UC Santa CruzSanta Cruz, California, USA
August 8, 2005

The familiar thermocouple is a simple, reliable temperature sensor. The underlying principles caught the attention of Boltzmann and Kelvin and sorting out the physics led to a Nobel Prize (Onsager, 1968). Further principles established in the 1950s and 1960s, notably by Ioffe in Russia as well as in the US, enabled these ‘sensors’ to do work in their own right, from cooling beer to powering spacecraft such as Voyager and Galileo. The past decade has witnessed a new generation of scientific ideas, some of which may extend their utility to mainstream applications. This presentation will briefly outline historical developments and how they connect to more recent developments