Q: How important is Hawking really within physics? How does he fit into the canon?

KF: He fits in as a person who dares to go out on the leading edge. One of the scientists today at this conference said, thank you Stephen for making life so difficult for us. What he meant by that was coming up with theories that send everybody scurrying, it just throws a spanner into the works. It challenges everybody all the time and that's one of his greatest contributions.

Also the fact that he's been willing, all through his career, to pull the rug out from under his discoveries. He's done this again and again – he's discovered something, then he's discovered the opposite.

He's always flipping around. It's the willingness to do that that is very impressive. He wants the general public to know that scientists change their minds, that scientists can admit they're wrong. It's very important. So many people among non-scientists see science as an unassailable monolith of truth, and it's not. It's an ongoing self-correcting process and that's the way he does it and that's the way he presents it.

That's tremendously valuable, especially to young people who are thinking of going into science or anyone who is thinking of basing their religious or philosophical beliefs on science. And that is an important legacy he has taught and continues to live out.

-- Michael Green, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge

Q: How does it feel taking over from Stephen Hawking?

MG: In a sense, were it not for my predecessor, it would have felt no different from being any other professor.

But the name carries a certain weight with it and it's extremely difficult to imagine one would live up to, not just Stephen but, for example, Paul Dirac, who had the chair in the last century, and all sorts of people before including Isaac Newton.