Hawking wasn't deified, he was a celebrity and anybody who accomplished what he had under his health conditions would be a celebrity anyway. His story was about

Hawking wasn't deified, he was a celebrity and anybody who accomplished what he had under his health conditions would be a celebrity anyway. His story was about succeeding in a field against all odds, not giving up and being positive. We love that kind of story. Amongst the physicists, Einstein is deified as the epitome of human intellect. He is perceived as such because he had the ability to explain extremely complex subjects with layman's terms. But even Einstein would have been just a minor celebrity if he wasn't a jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany. We can observe that his popularity was a project because Einstein didn't have the character of a showman. I bet if Feynman fled the Nazis and came to USA, we would have a real deity!