  This paper comprehensively explores Stephen Hawking's interaction with Jacob
Bekenstein. Both Hawking and Bekenstein benefited from the interaction with
each other. It is shown that Hawking's interaction with Bekenstein drove him to
solve the problems in Bekenstein's black hole thermodynamics in terms of a new
thermal radiation mechanism. Hawking derived the thermal radiation using a
semiclassical approximation in which the matter fields are treated quantum
mechanically on a classical spacetime background. Hawking's semiclassical
approximation yielded a simple formula for the entropy of the black hole, which
turned out to be equivalent to Bekenstein's equation for entropy.
