His theories have been trashed, yet the Stephen Hawking myth endures. By robert matthews
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As the story-line for a movie, it takes some beating: a wheelchair-bound genius races against time to find the Keys to the Cosmos. Yet it is a real-life drama, and one that has been unfolding for the past 30 years - with Cambridge University physicist Professor Stephen Hawking in the lead role.
This week, BBC2's Horizon raised the curtain on what many suspect will be the final act. For the past year it has filmed him working while he battles with the motor neurone disease he has fought so long.
Only the most cold-hearted could wish him anything but well. Even his critics have nothing but admiration for his achievement of not just surviving a disease that kills half its victims in three years, but also of contributing to science at the highest level.
Nonetheless, many scientists are irked by the gap between the popular myth of Hawking as the greatest scientist of his day
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| Unlike those of Einstein, not one of Hawking’s notions has ever been confirmed |
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and the reality of his discoveries. In the media, he is hailed as "Einstein's heir". Yet an international poll, organised by Britain's Institute of Physics to find the greatest physicist of all time, left Hawking with just two votes.
The reasons are not hard to fathom. Unlike those of Einstein, not one of Hawking's postulates has ever been confirmed. Indeed, his theories about the universe - put forward in his notoriously unread bestseller A Brief History of Time - have all been demolished. And last year, he himself conceded that one of his most cherished notions about black holes was wrong.
Now he is racing to resurrect it, though most scientists could hardly care less. For them, mathematical equations are no substitute for contact with reality.
And Hawking's grand ideas - like his media reputation - have always been remarkably untouched by the real world. 
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