You're not missing anything, but I'd say you're not clearing your mind of all the stuff you already know about light either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_

You're not missing anything, but I'd say you're not clearing your mind of all the stuff you already know about light either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29 It would be essentially ray tracing. "Light", from our eye, travels though stuff and ends up colliding with an object. We are informed of how the ray was affected and how it collided, perhaps because the ray is an extension of our perception (like a limb of sorts), or perhaps because the final collision always causes it to go back exactly the way it came. It's simpler and more obvious than the idea that there exists a truly massive amount of light emitted though various processes in nature, most of it never perceived by any eye, and the minuscule sample caught by our pupil is still large enough to provide us with so much detail. In the absence of further knowledge on the subject you're studying, Occam's razor can easily mislead.