Stephen Hawking to retire from prestigious post

Prof. Hawking is probably one of three thinkers that have had the greatest influence on me, the other two being Prof. Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin.

And for what it is worth, personally, I agree with his 2005 solution to the black hole information paradox, in non-technical terms, that universes (euclidean metrics) with no black hole solutions essentially cancel out those with black hole solutions in the quantum gravity path integral, so from the point of view of the path integral, there effectively are "no black holes", and therefore no information paradox. Cute I know, but if somebody has a better answer I'd like to hear it! (I like it because for example in string theory I have read there are dualities involved by virtue of which one can grab information back out of black holes, which may well be true, but Hawking's solution does not depend on string theory being true, which I like because it is more conservative, i.e., it is in the world of ordinary quantum gravity and not in the world of string theory which for my money the jury is still out on.)

Anyway, my personal best wishes to Prof. Hawking!!