In 1999, CNN's Larry King introduced Stephen Hawking to television viewers as the man 'who can sell physics better than Madonna can sell sex'. When you consider that his book A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, sold 9 million copies by 2002 and was on the London Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks, the description could well be right.
Dubbed by some as the 'unread best-seller', the book has, nevertheless, served to popularise some of the more arcane notions of theoretical physics. Black holes and the big bang are almost household phrases because of it.
Notwithstanding the fact that most of the 64-year-old professor's work is mathematical in nature, there's hardly an equation in sight in A Brief History, which helps its popularity, but you might still well ask why a book on such abstruse material would grace so many bookshelves, read or not.
Professor Yau Shing-tung, director of Chinese University's Institute of Advanced Mathematical Sciences and chair of Strings 2006 - a six-day conference on string theory in Beijing next week that Professor Hawking is due to address - has no doubt about the physicist's appeal. He says Hawking is blessed with a sense of humour and the rare ability to communicate difficult ideas in a popular way that strikes a chord with the layman.
'That's one of the reasons why we invited him to China this year,' he said. 'We respect Stephen as a physicist and wanted him to come and give a talk because of that, but we also wanted to exploit the fact that he's extremely famous and can talk to a general audience and excite the general layman about general theoretical physics, which has not been as popular in China as in other countries.'
If most people outside the classroom are familiar with the concept of the big bang or know what black holes are, odds are it will be because of Professor Hawking's popularising. There are, after all, any number of scientific concepts equally as important to cutting-edge research that are completely unknown outside of higher academia.