Hawking had the ability of scholorly math as well as to present complex cosmic ideas like a thriller you could buy at the airport but dumbed down enough for all to understand. Its a hard thing to do since you can dumb down too much into nonsense. He 'is' also very funny.
His math was opaque to me but 'Hawking radiation' was made possible due to Richard Feynman (Cornell) quantum insights and Stephen went on to unite 3 disparet branchs of physics with the concept of a lifetime of a black hole.

Hawking has demonstrated that the last but longest 'living/existing' things in the universe are black holes yet they too will evaporate into 'nothing'.