My interest has always been to understand what the world is like.
This is the main reason that I majored in physics: if physics is the study of nature, then to understand nature one should learn physics first.
But my hopes were disappointed by what is (or at least seems to be) commonly accepted in many physics departments all over the world: after quantum mechanics, we should give up the idea that physics provides us with a picture of reality.
At first, I believed this was really the case and I was so disappointed that I decided to forget about my ‘romantic’ dream and do something useful. Therefore , in my undergraduate thesis I analyzed the production of radioactive isotopes that could be used in medicine, publishing various articles with my adviser.
After graduation, while still working with my professor in nuclear physics, I began a course in scientific communication to increase my ability to write about technical material.
At some point, I was assigned a paper to explain quantum mechanics to the common public. As is obvious, in order to be able to explain things to others, one should know them very well and so I went back to the books. And what happened to me was (maybe?) what happened to David Bohm: in 1951 he wrote a book on quantum mechanics and in 1952 he developed his hidden variable theory.
I did not know anything about him at the time, but I realized that some of the things I took for granted were not so obviously true, and I started to regain hope that quantum mechanics was not really the ``end of physics" as I meant it.
Therefore, I decided to go to graduate school in physics to figure out what the situation really was. While taking my Ph. D. in the foundations of quantum mechanics, I understood that what physicists thought was an unavoidable truth was instead a blunt mistake: quantum mechanics does not force us to give up anything, and certainly not the possibility to investigate reality through physics.
During the physics Ph.D. years, I realized my place was not really in a physics department, since my concerns were (and still are) more philosophical and less technical.
Therefore I came to understand that the natural evolution of my career would be in a philosophy department. For this reason, I started my second Ph.D. in philosophy at Rutgers.
At Rutgers and with the other philosophers of physics I encountered so far I could finally discuss about the nature of reality through physics: what I wanted all along .