I do know who they are.
When Hawking began his graduate studies, there was much debate in the physics community about the prevailing theories of the creation of the universe: the
Big Bang and the
Steady State theories. Inspired by
Roger Penrose's theorem of a
spacetime singularity in the centre of black holes, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe, and during
1965 wrote his thesis on this topic. There were other positive developments: Hawking received a research fellowship at
Gonville and Caius College. He obtained his
PhD degree in cosmology in March 1966, and his essay entitled "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time" shared top honours with one by Penrose to win that year's prestigious
Adams Prize.
Stephen Hawking's first major scientific work was published with Roger Penrose (a physicist very famous in his own right) and George Ellis (not as famous as Penrose and Hawking, but still very well known), during the period 1968-1970. They demonstrated that every solution to the equations of general relativity guarantees the existence of a singular boundary for space and time in the past.
This landmark is now known as the "singularity theorem," and is a tremendously important finding, being about as close as we can get to a mathematical rationalization for the Big Bang Theory
In 1965 Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories were testing a sensitive horn antenna which was designed for detecting low levels of microwave radiation. They discovered a low level of microwave background "noise", like the low level of electrical noise which might produce "snow" on a television screen. After unsuccessful attempts to eliminate it, they pointed their antenna to another part of the sky to check whether the "noise" was coming from space, and got the same kind of signal. Being persuaded that the noise was in their instrument, they took other, more sophisticated steps to eliminate the noise, such as cooling their detector to low temperatures.
Finding no explanations for the origin of the noise, they finally concluded that it was indeed coming from space, but that it was the same from all directions. It was a distribution of microwave radiation which matched a
blackbody curve for a radiator at about 2.7 Kelvins.
After all their efforts to eliminate the "noise" signal, they found that a group at Princeton had predicted that there would be a residual microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang and were planning an experiment to try to detect it. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their discovery.
Stephen hawking, worked out the Mathematical theory of the big bang. Giving Eisenstein theories beauty.
Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson found analogue evidence of the 2.7 degrees radiation heat noise from the big bang.
Therefore providing evidence of the big bang. And rightly receiving the Nobel prize for it even though they didn't know what it was at first.
I already knew all this. Not sure why your giving me hints.