Quantum theory is the most comprehensive and accurate theory known to man, describing nature at all scales from quark to quasar and forming the foundation for numerous technologies including lasers, semiconductors and nuclear power. But the price physicists have paid for this powerful theory is the loss of an overall picture of how the world works. The problem of observation lies at the the heart of the physicist's reality crisis. Nothing exposes the perplexity at the heart of physics more starkly than certain preposterous-sounding claims a few outspoken physicists are making concerning how the world really works. If we take these clains at face value, the stories physicists tell resemble the tales of mystics and madmen.
Physicists are quick to reject such unsavory associations and insist that they speak sober fact.
We do not make these claims out of ignorance, they say, like ancient mapmakers filling in terra incognitas with plausible geography. Not ignorance, but the emergence of unsuspected knowledge forces on us all new visions of the way things really are. In the case of Bell's proof, one can continue to believe in a local reality by denying one of Bell's assumptions. However because Bell's proof is so short and most of his assumptions accessible to experiment, such additional suppositions are not easy to find. Hence the various negations of Bell's conclusion tend to be rather farfetched and lead to realities more preposterous than the superluminal reality they attempt to exorcise.