Georges Lemaître was the guy who formulated what would later be known the Big Bang Theory, and it was Fred Hoyle who coined the term. That was in 1949, and Hawking was only 7 years old in 1949.
Hawking did Quantum Gravity and Black Holes, which of course have been proven to exist.
I wrote ‘proved’. Look it up. No one had done a mathematical proof prior to he and another dude writing it.
Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.