Earthlight

I'm re-reading this 1955 novel by Arthur Clarke, and wondering if I'll be able to finish it. The electronics side of things *really* hasn't aged well. And there's the trope of the planetary colonies sucking away Earth's best and brightest... to lifeless wastes enhanced in this book by a lack of heavy metals, because only Earth had a Moon whose tides brought such up to the surface. Finally, there's a line I just hit, where an astronomer wonders if they'll ever find out why supernovae -- there's one going on as the novel begins -- happen. This in a book which is set at least two hundred years in the future, possibly more. I have no idea when we figured out what's probably behind them, but obviously way sooner than that.

*searches*
Huh, I wasn't expecting to easily find anything useful, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supernova_observation#Telescope_observation has Hoyle with ideas in 1946, a collapse model developed through the 1970s, and the Type Ia model in 1973.