Yeah, I’ve heard that story before (straight from the horse’s mouth at the beginning of the book), and was under the impression Hawking had said something like “In the end, I found there was one equation it was impossible to avoid, it was too fundamental, blah blah…”, which seemed silly to me, and whose silliness I wanted to call out. However, checking the actual quote now, it doesn’t seem he quite said anything like that, so I guess my memory was just fooling me.