Doing Science on your own... and understanding it fundamentally

As a PhD student, I've been reading lots of important scientific, research papers, and accent or point of direction is on a vast pool of articles among which one needs to be intelligent, prominent and shifty enough to dig up the right ones in order to be creative and original enough to produce something new, or at least something slightly different that no one else has came up to.

However, as an old soul, romantic, or just someone with no "race over everything and everyone to reach a degree", I have a need to understand terms and ideas fundamentally. I always lead my self by words of Feynman and Einstein who said that if you can't explain something to 6-year old, than you don't truly understand it. And in that process of understanding it fundamentally, I loose lot and lot of time.

Just recently, in preparation for one of my exams, I've been studying terms such as soft particle, interference O(1), O(Np), decays as polarization analyzers etc... Soft is something fluffy, such as those cute toys kids tend to sleep with. How can an invisible, or virtual particle be soft? Yeah, it can. It is a particle with low transversal momentum. But low in this case can vary very much. And when you try to explain someone a story of Higgs, you fall into abyss trying to connect what was actually found in 2012 with sea of models of Higgs doublet, triplet, composite Higgs this kind, that kind etc. And again, I melt between these ambiguities.

I audit other students' presentations, but I see just a good talk and passion for higher stair, not for scientific knowledge itself. And I wonder whether I'm just an Alice in a ScienceRaceland, or have I missed the upgrade phase of mind and soul somewhere in past?

And when I try to go back on track I used to know, path of good old books (because we all used to learn from books), I don't find one that explicitly explains those big important terms everyone uses in their superimportant articles and talks. It seems like there's been a gap between undergraduate courses' books and PhD literature.

Still, I choose to enjoy this path where I get to meet every term for itself and treat it with time it deserves, rather to take that time and jump to the place where I have time with no real satisfaction of knowing and understanding truly, the world we live and die in.