At risk of being voted down I will say that the time in which Hawking has worked has been a "dark ages" for physics in my mind. (As a physics PhD; and I don't blame Hawking for this, rather the rest of the environment.)
Circa 1970 the number of physics PhD's produced has outstripped the number of permanent jobs in physics, sometimes by a factor of 30:1!
One result of that is that physicists have to make it through a keyhole to get established. Another change that has happened since then has been a profound disconnect between theory and experiment. Back in the day, Einstein could make a prediction about light being bent by the Sun and have it be confirmed in his own lifetime.
The "modern" physics superstar like Hawking or Witten just doesn't do that. When neutron oscillations were finally detected after years, it is almost forgotten who to give credit for for the theory because it is really just a conjecture that some matrix element isn't zero. Even in condensed matter there is the spectacle of seeing theoreticians dogpile on the problem of cuprate oxide superconductivity for 20 years without making any progress until an experimentalist noted stripes in the electron density.
The result of it is that you get ahead by getting the approval of much older physicists, not by understanding the world.
As for Hawking himself, his ideas about information loss in black holes, the wavefunction not being unitary and all that were just plain bad ideas that held back quantum gravity by 30 years or so.
I'm a tech worker not a scientist, but I think I understand. What frustrates me more than groupthink itself is when a group of people who consider themselves truth seekers somehow considers themselves immune to groupthink.
Circa 1970 the number of physics PhD's produced has outstripped the number of permanent jobs in physics, sometimes by a factor of 30:1!
One result of that is that physicists have to make it through a keyhole to get established. Another change that has happened since then has been a profound disconnect between theory and experiment. Back in the day, Einstein could make a prediction about light being bent by the Sun and have it be confirmed in his own lifetime.
The "modern" physics superstar like Hawking or Witten just doesn't do that. When neutron oscillations were finally detected after years, it is almost forgotten who to give credit for for the theory because it is really just a conjecture that some matrix element isn't zero. Even in condensed matter there is the spectacle of seeing theoreticians dogpile on the problem of cuprate oxide superconductivity for 20 years without making any progress until an experimentalist noted stripes in the electron density.
The result of it is that you get ahead by getting the approval of much older physicists, not by understanding the world.
As for Hawking himself, his ideas about information loss in black holes, the wavefunction not being unitary and all that were just plain bad ideas that held back quantum gravity by 30 years or so.