Random entry

It's one of my random weird moods again. I have to solve a not-too-standard central potential quantum mechanics problem for my research. It seems easy but isn't giving anything nice : must be one of those ugly confluent hypergeometric functions. I am taking a quantum field theory course this semester, and it all looks like a series of inspired jugglery moves with little relation to "reality". We are following the less conventional path integral approach to quantization and guess what! till now we haven't got into path integrals or quantization of any kind. We're just looking at actions made of fields and how they must be invariant with respect to various transforms, and so their symmetries. Many a time we look at transforms precisely because we would like those symmetries to be there. Is learning physics for the average physicist merely mastering an endless bag of tricks and formalisms we pretend to ourselves to understand after merely internalizing and uncriticially accepting them? I still feel that way about quantum mechanics at times. Anyway, the world's heating up, the economy is melting down and India is being rocked by terror attacks every other day.....so not much point in worrying much about anything, is there?