system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How Steven Hawking and Neil Degrasse Tyson's theories help the field of astronomy?

How does knowing their idea's on string theory and black holes help us compared to not knowing them?
gpt
Hawking's ideas help us look for black holes. He was the one who proved that black holes emit radiation (hence "Hawking radiation"), so we know that if we want to find a black hole, we should look for Hawking radiation. This is extremely useful since black holes are... well, black, and do not emit any other sort of radiation like light for us to see. They're thus pretty damn tricky to detect.

Hawking also was the one who laid the theoretical groundwork behind warp drives. Warp drives obviously do not exist yet and may never exist, but without his work we wouldn't have even known where to start with trying to make one.

Neil deGrasse Tyson frankly does not have a particularly noteworthy resume in terms of his theoretical contributions to the field. He's more of an educator and public figure than a "hard" scientist. That's not to say that he doesn't know his stuff or isn't worthy of praise and respect, just that he isn't really that highly regarded as a "physicist's physicist," if that makes sense.

Frankly, though, neither Hawking or NDT are really considered that highly within the physics community. They're very well respected, of course, but there are a lot of men and women who most of us have never heard of that made much larger contributions to the field over the past century. Hawking and NDT are both very good at dealing with the non-physics community, which is obviously very important.