Hawking was one of the good physicists of his generation, not the universal genius the popular press has depicted. It is a pity, because this confusi… - Carlo Rovelli

[I]n a fundamental description of nature we must "forget time"... this can be done in the classical and in the quantum theory.

Quite remarkably, this was understood before having good clocks... It is one of great intuitions by Einstein. In 1915 he completed the theory of relativity... At the time clocks were not good enough... it was a theory, a good speculation... Today it is not a theory... It's a fact that we measure in the labaratory. ...It's so clear and definite that technology needs this to be taken into account.

... theoretical physics is less clean than the way it's usually solved. You can always change parameters and save yourself. ... it's very rare that theories are ruled out by just an experiment or a group of experiments. Theories usually come with flexibility. Theoreticians can add flexibility. And so new experiments — you can just patch up your theory.