>But is his work really worth putting him on the same pedestal as Newton?
Sure. Hawking's work greatly extended our understanding of black holes is fascinating and important to our understand of both the origin of the universe and it's ultimate demise. For the question of "What was the Universe prior to the Big Bang", the Hartle-Hawking state is, at current, one of our best answers - likely a singularity of both space and time, meaning that the idea of a boundary for the beginning of time isn't something that actually exists.
Newtonian physics are important in that at the energy and mass levels we experience life in, they work out to be close enough to how things actually work as to not be meaningfully distinct.
But they're not actually (the most) correct. Special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics show that we have more correct understandings of physics than Newton's, and certain ideas of Newton's are incompatible with our current understanding. Gravity is an interesting and simple one - with Newtonian physics, the apple falls to earth. However, Galileo would have disagreed with Newton, had they been able to discuss the topic. Leibniz did disagree. Newton was a believer in an absolute frame of reference in the universe, whereas the underpinning of general relativity is that all frames of reference are relative - that if you use the apple as your frame of reference, it is the earth falling towards it. And this wasn't something new that came from Einstein and Hilbert - Galileo recognized this, Leibniz recognized this, etc. Even when Newton was using Galileo's principal of relativity to develop Newtonian physics, he diverged on this fairly central part.
In fact, the work of Einstein and others has shown us that gravity is almost certainly not a force at all, that mass is not attracting mass over a distance.
TLDR: Newtonian physics aren't actually "correct", yet we venerate him because of how important of a body of work they are. Hawking's work on black holes and singularities is important to our understanding of where the universe came from and how it will end.
Sure. Hawking's work greatly extended our understanding of black holes is fascinating and important to our understand of both the origin of the universe and it's ultimate demise. For the question of "What was the Universe prior to the Big Bang", the Hartle-Hawking state is, at current, one of our best answers - likely a singularity of both space and time, meaning that the idea of a boundary for the beginning of time isn't something that actually exists.
Newtonian physics are important in that at the energy and mass levels we experience life in, they work out to be close enough to how things actually work as to not be meaningfully distinct.
But they're not actually (the most) correct. Special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics show that we have more correct understandings of physics than Newton's, and certain ideas of Newton's are incompatible with our current understanding. Gravity is an interesting and simple one - with Newtonian physics, the apple falls to earth. However, Galileo would have disagreed with Newton, had they been able to discuss the topic. Leibniz did disagree. Newton was a believer in an absolute frame of reference in the universe, whereas the underpinning of general relativity is that all frames of reference are relative - that if you use the apple as your frame of reference, it is the earth falling towards it. And this wasn't something new that came from Einstein and Hilbert - Galileo recognized this, Leibniz recognized this, etc. Even when Newton was using Galileo's principal of relativity to develop Newtonian physics, he diverged on this fairly central part.
In fact, the work of Einstein and others has shown us that gravity is almost certainly not a force at all, that mass is not attracting mass over a distance.
TLDR: Newtonian physics aren't actually "correct", yet we venerate him because of how important of a body of work they are. Hawking's work on black holes and singularities is important to our understanding of where the universe came from and how it will end.