To put it bluntly, any university willing to give a PhD to a physics student who actually believes this is real should lose it's accreditation based on this fact alone.
What someone believes or not should not disqualify their work or published results. Period. The work should be evaluated on its own merits.
Unless the idea is really to form a cabal and only allow research on topics that don't question anything, which seems to be what several aim for (and of course, it's easier to get a grant for those)
A mathematicians beliefs on God should have no bearings on the quality of her theorems.
A physics student in training unable to recognize (much less participating with and encouraging) a crackpot's physics theories which should be obvious to any undergrad, should not attain a degree in physics. It's not about persecuting beliefs, but a disturbing lack of basic understanding.
http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3256631/dna-molecule...
I guess this guy should never have got his doctorate, let alone a Nobel prize?
``...and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God."
I'm skeptical of this claim, but I don't fault them for trying. I also don't fault them for having strange beliefs. All sorts of geniuses have had very odd beliefs, from Newton onward. Seems to go hand in hand with the kind of bravely inquisitive mind that does such things.
Note that I do not mean science. Fundamentalist positivism is really a religious fundamentalist movement built around scientific nomenclature and academic orthodoxy. I consider it a form of cargo cult pseudoscience.
Suppose there were 1 trillion intelligent civilizations spanning 2,000,000 light years wide civilizations in the observable universe right now. Observable universe has a radius of ed: ~78 billion light years. 4/3 pi * r ^3 = ~2 * 10 ^ 33 cubic light years. Where those 1 billion civilizations would cover 4/3 * pi * (2,000,000/2) ^3 * 1 trillion = 4.19 * 10 ^ 30 cubic light years. End result we would have (2e33/4.19e30) = less than 1% chance of being in the area of even one of them.
PS: Sure it's a silly example, but space is ridiculously huge. If assume there was 1 billion billion billion civilisations as advanced as us (as in radio at current power levels) and chances are we would not detect any of them.