https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-stephen-hawking/

There was almost a religious reverence in the hush that descended upon the audience at the beginning of a Stephen Hawking lecture. Typically, every seat was taken, and if the fire marshals weren’t a force to be reckoned with, there were large clots of people near the exits and in the aisles, craning their necks to get their first view of the physicist. And as he wheeled out onto stage, the audience was palpably awed. "Sometimes there were 30 or 40 seconds of pure silence," says Christophe Galfard, one of Hawking's graduate students who himself became a popularizer of science. "For me, it was the silence that made it so ... that's what triggered my wish to pursue that road."

But despite Hawking's passion for sharing his work in cosmology and astrophysics with the public, few in the audience were there to learn about his science. They were there to be in the presence a person who had ascended Mount Sinai and been granted a glimpse of the secrets of the cosmos. Hawking was a great scientist, but in his quest for recognition, he took on the mantle of a prophet. It was a Faustian bargain that made Hawking the preeminent scientist of our lifetimes—but at a cost.