John Perlin, UC Santa Barbara physics researcher and author of “Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy” (New World Library, 2013), will talk about the development of all solar technologies, beginning with the ancient Chinese, Greeks and Romans who designed the majority of their houses to scoop up sunlight in winter. He will also show that over the last three thousand years people have used solar concentrators to focus sunlight to light fires, during the Renaissance, to solder metal, and by the nineteenth century, to run steam engines; that since the end of the nineteenth century, a solar water heater industry has developed and spread throughout the world; and that as far back as the 1870s, people learned how to convert sunlight directly into electricity. The myriad ways people have benefited from solar energy over the last six thousand years raises the question: If years ago people successfully harnessed the sun’s energy, can’t we, with a far superior tool kit, do better, using their work as our foundation?