Also, I don't believe that Hawking ever stopped working on cosmology. He may have been somewhat washed up or was riding our earlier successes. But, you know, the exact same criticism applies to Albert Einstein, whose later work was mostly fruitless as far as I know. And yet everybody goes around putting up posters on classroom walls showing Einstein in his old age, with his crazy hair or tongue sticking out, usually completely ignorant of anything he did besides being able to recite an equation he came up with as a much, much younger man!