Recovering Physicist wrote:
Hawking is wildly overhyped and overrated by a PR machine in need of a marketable hero figure.
Compared to other physicists, he is AT BEST fourth-rate. His name cannot even be mentioned alongside that of Einstein, and Newton and Maxwell might be up there too.
Hawking was primarily a character rather than a mind. And not a particularly interesting or appealing one.
Apart from all that he was also a pretty crappy person in real life.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/people/stephen-hawking-his-wives-and-sycophantic-admirers/news-story/9dd8369b36370a0db78b09ef684ca07d