Bell doubted quantum mechanics and relativity

Physicist John Stewart Bell was famous for Bell's theorem, and considered by many a great genius who should have gotten a Nobel prize.

A physics article says:

But despite the ascendancy of the Copenhagen interpretation, the intuition that physical objects, no matter how small, can be in only one location at a time has been difficult for physicists to shake. Albert Einstein, who famously doubted that God plays dice with the universe, worked for a time on what he called a "ghost wave" theory of quantum mechanics, thought to be an elaboration of de Broglie's theory. In his 1976 Nobel Prize lecture, Murray Gell-Mann declared that Niels Bohr, the chief exponent of the Copenhagen interpretation, "brainwashed an entire generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved." John Bell, the Irish physicist whose famous theorem is often mistakenly taken to repudiate all "hidden-variable" accounts of quantum mechanics, was, in fact, himself a proponent of pilot-wave theory. "It is a great mystery to me that it was so soundly ignored," he said.

It got this comment:

The author of pilot-wave theory Louis deBroglie was an aetherist and he wrote, for example:

"any particle, even isolated, has to be imagined as in continuous "energetic contact" with a hidden medium ... It certainly is of quite complex character. It could not serve as a universal reference medium, as this would be contrary to relativity theory."

It's not surprising, the guy promoting the aether and even doubting of relativity theory gets ignored with no mercy for century with mainstream physics.

People assume that Bell was a champion of quantum mechanics, but actually he and his early followers were trying to prove quantum mechanics wrong. His theorem gave a way to distinguish quantum mechanics from hidden variable theories. Subsequent experiments verified quantum mechanics, and ruled out hidden variable theories.

The de Broglie Bohm pilot wave theory is considered an interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it is really only an interpretation of some non-relativistic special cases. It is supposedly more intuitive because it tells you where the electron really is, but it also requires you to believe in action-at-a-distance ghosts that accompany the electrons. So it is a lot more bizarre than quantum mechanics.

Bell did not believe in relativity as a spacetime theory either, as he is quoted in this 2009 paper:

If it is just long enough to span the required distance initially, then as the rockets speed up, it will become too short, because of its need to Fitzgerald contract, and must finally break. It must break when, at a sufficiently high velocity, the artificial prevention of the natural contraction impose s intolerable stress.

In the Minkowski spacetime relativity, the FitzGerald contraction is a geometric illusion, and does not cause any stresses. Bell's explanation is wrong, as explained in that paper.

Relativity and quantum mechanics are the pillars of XX-century physics. It is good to have skeptics who keep the mainstream physicists honest, I guess, but nobody gets a Nobel prize for that. If experiments had overthrown the conventional wisdom, then Bell would be hailed as a great genius, but that did not happen. In the end, all Bell had was an argument against hidden variables that was more persuasive than the existing arguments that had already convinced everyone.

I use the The Son of Man painting because it is the symbol of the John Stewart Bell Prize. Something about reality being obscured, I guess.

Here is a recent paper for a book honoring Bell.