Hawking developped these two main insights:
** Bh radiation. Using classic QM he proved bh's radiate, losing mass, something establiished experimental later. Later a young Italian physicist prove his hypothesis further.
** No boundary proposal. He integrated a Riemanian plus later time Minkoskiam spacetime to avoid insoluble early universe cosmologies, in his work with Hurtle. The theory has predictions and is an active area of research i.e
I know a guy who is trying to remove some infinities that present further solutions
While Hawking did propose that black holes radiate energy and lose mass that way, this has NOT been experimentally observed, the main difficulty being that the temperature of this radiation is in the microkelvin range for astrophysical black holes.
He has done work of much greater significance: The singularity theorem with Penrose and the proposal that black holes have a finite entropy, when probed by quantum probes.
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