The left honors him profusely just so they can say how brilliant he is and then proclaim that there must be no God because even “the brilliant” Stephen Hawkings says so and if you disagree, well, then you must be a moron because, you see, Hawking is so gosh darn brilliant. Trust us, we said he's brilliant... and he even won a Nobel prize so that proves what he is saying must be true.
Pffft...
For all his juice, he couldn’t keep the Texas Supercollider project alive.
They spent a billion digging the hole, and another filling it in. They ended up building it in Europe, where all of the actual talent in cosmology now resides.
Oh well.