I suppose that the fame that Einstein attracted a century ago has been mirrored in our own time by Hawking. The are linked by curved space-time. Einstein's equations described it. Hawking studied the black holes that came out of the equations. These days we describe space-time as like a sheet of Lycra with a bowling ball on to represent the mass of a star. Sadly I've never had a large enough sheet of Lycra to do it. 50 years ago Hawking had these models made. The top one shows the way a star (the yellow centre) dents space-time. The bottom one shows that a black hole does something very extreme to the space-time.
