Hawkins is not the guru people make out. Like Billy Nye the Anus Guy.
Not quite.
Bill Nye is a guy with an engineering degree who has never really done anything with his technical training, and certainly knows very little about science.
Hawking is an important cosmologist with an over-inflated reputation among the general public that he does not have among his peers. His recent statements about Black Holes have been over-hyped in the popular press to promote controversy, but they are really quite mild and don't actually change any of the current theories about Black Holes much. The fact that Black Holes do not have an "exact" Schwarzschild Radius is not new; Hawking Radiation is essentially a manifestation of that fact, which has been known for at least 30 years.
Hawking is over-hyped because of a press fascination with the idea that there is a "smartest man in the world," a ridiculous idea on the face of it.
The most famous example of this myth was Einstein, a truly great physicist like Newton or Archimedes who only comes along every five hundred years or more. He was still not "the smartest man in the world," and by the time the press discovered him his great achievements were many years behind him. The fact that Hawking is disabled and has survived a horrible disease orders of magnitude longer than most adds to his mystique, but he's no Einstein, let alone the "smartest man in the world."
Truth is, even Einstein wasn't.
Nor is anyone who disputes his claims.......
After all, it is "Theoretical Science"...........
Hawking lost all credibility when he started to become an atheist philosopher, essentially himself buying into the hype that he’s the smartest man in history. He ventured into territory that he had no business venturing into and some of his comments end up sounding like a college student.
His understand of physics is certainly historic, but his understanding of the origins of physics is sophomoric at best. Hawking contradicts himself repeatedly when he talks about the creation of matter.