No Stupid Questions

Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.

He shouldn't have gotten one for SR specifically anyways because Hendrik Lorentz had already developed a theory that was mathematically equivalent and presented a year prior to Einstein.

The speed of light can be derived from Maxwell's equations, which is weird to be able to derive a speed just by analyzing how electromagnetism works, because anyone in any reference frame would derive the same speed, which implies the existence of a universal speed. If the speed is universal, what it is universal relative to?

Physicists prior to Einstein believed there might be a universal reference frame which defines absolute time and absolute space, these days called a preferred foliation. The Michelson-Morley experiment was an attempt to measure the existence of this preferred foliation because most theories of how it worked would render it detectable in principle, but found no evidence for it.

Most physicists these days retell this experiment as having debunked the idea and led to its replacement with Einstein's special relativity. But the truth is more complicated than that, because Lorentz found you could patch the idea by just assuming objects physically contract based on their motion relative to preferred foliation. Lorentz's theory was presented in 1904, a year before Einstein, and was mathematically equivalent, so it makes all the same predictions, and so anything Einstein's theory would predict, his theory would've also predicted.

The reason Lorentz's theory fell by the wayside is because, by being able to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment which was meant to detect the preferred foliation, it meant it was no longer detectable, and so people liked Einstein's theory more that threw out this undetectable aspect. But it would still be weird to give Einstein the Nobel prize for what is ultimately just a simplification of Lorentz's theory. (Einstein also already received one for something he did deserve anyways.)

But there are also good reasons these days to consider putting the preferred foliation back in and that Einstein was wrong. The Friedmann solution to Einstein's general relativity (the solution associated with the universe we actually live in) spontaneously gives rise to a preferred foliation which is actually empirically observable. You can measure your absolute motion relative to the universe by looking at the cosmic dipole in the cosmic background radiation. Since we know you can measure it now and have actually measured our absolute motion in the universe, the argument against Lorentz's theory is much weaker.

An even stronger argument, however, comes from quantum mechanics. A famous theorem by the physicist John Bell proves the impossibility of "local realism," and in this case locality means locality in terms of special relativity, and realism means belief that particles have real states in the real physical world independently of you looking at them (called the ontic states) which explain what shows up on your measurement device when you try to measure them. Since many physicists are committed to the idea of special relativity, they conclude that Bell's theorem must debunk realism, that objective reality does not exist independently of you looking at it, and devolve into bizarre quantum mysticism and weirdness.

But you can equally interpret this to mean that special relativity is wrong and that the preferred foliation needs to put back in. The physicist Hrvoje Nikolic for example published a paper titled "Relativistic QFT from a Bohmian perspective: A proof of concept" showing that you can fit quantum mechanics to a realist theory that reproduces the predictions of relativistic quantum mechanics if you add back in a preferred foliation.