In several polls of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, or even of the top living physicists, Hawking is either absent or crawls in at the bottom of the list. Is he, then, not all he's cracked up to be?

    Massive bodies, such as the Sun, cause space to curve around them

On the contrary, he is a huge presence in modern physics. It's just that physics has a lot of astonishing minds, and Hawking is one among many.

Hawking's genius, which arguably deserves a Nobel Prize, is to have brought together several different but equally fundamental fields of physical theory: gravitation, cosmology, quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory.

It starts with general relativity: the theory of gravitation that Albert Einstein devised in the 1910s to replace that of Isaac Newton.