The Implausibility of Light as a Wave

As I understand such things, conventional wisdom in astronomical circles holds that the light of an object - be it a planet, star or other celestial body - is transmitted in all directions simultaneously, and eventually reaches the eyes or instruments of those in a position to observe it, be they from planet Earth or somewhere else. It is also a given that light travels at 300,000 km/hr in a wave, with enough force to penetrate countless obstacles over unfathomable distances so as to reach our eyes.
 

At the heart and soul of this proposition is that this light - composed of photons - has some kind of substance, and that that substance was produced by the source, in this case, a star.

 

How plausible is this notion? First, let us consider light being broadcast along just a single plane, separated for the sake of argument into 360 degrees. Were this our physical world, we would be forced to accept that light could travel from some star for a million years and arrive - plus or minus any obstacles encountered or the gravitic influence of the kajillion things it had to pass or near before it reached you - with equal brightness at 360 different points. Those 360 points of light, having travelled for a million years, would arrive at destinations along that single plane approximately 4,400 light years apart (distance x (Pi/2)/360), plenty of distance to wedge yet further sets of eyes to observe the aforementioned star.

 

However, those 360 degrees are themselves infinitely divisible, which means that along a single plane, the image would be transmitted infinitely. The physical universe that light travels through exists in three dimensions, which poses us the amusing prospect of multiplying an infinity of possibilities in two dimensions by additional infinities of possibilities. And yet, any source of light is finite in its properties: weight, mass, energy generated, etc, and thus finite in its capacity to generate light - or images.

 

This is never so evident as when you consider that stars of varying brightness exist at all. Surely the fact that there are stars of different sizes and brightness speaks to the finiteness of their radiance?
 

So, how could any source of light - regardless of how bright - radiate light in an infinity of directions?

 

Further, how is it that not only light could be transmitted infinitely, but the image of that star as well? We know from our physical world that images are measurable based on their size and resolution, and the larger the image or the greater the detail, the more computing, storage and electrical power that are required to manipulate them. By inference, this must mean that a broadcast image has measurable mass or substance of some sort.  It is also an axiom that larger objects are more visible at distance than smaller ones.  If indeed it is true that a telescope with enough resolution could not only detect the light but pick up the image of the star, then that image as broadcast must have considerable mass to travel thousands of light years to retain enough resolution to be progressively better discerned by ever more powerful telescopes.

 

As a further test, is it not the case that the light that travelled 1 million years to my eyes must be different from the light that travels from the same source to the eyes of the person next to me? Nobody would argue that the light and images the two of us perceive in looking at, say, a globe of the world, would be different, since of necessity we would see a different view of the globe based on our position within the room. How then would it be different for our star, other than the immensely greater distance the light travelled?

 

Assuming this reasoning is sound, we must accept that there is some other means by which images and radiation - regardless of the spectrum - are transmitted through the cosmos to our eyes. Is it not more likely that the image of the star, rather than being broadcast, is in fact "received" by some medium heretofore unexplained and sustained until it reaches our eyes? That in fact, the dynamic exists not with the transmission of light and images but to our eyes, but the perceiving of them?

 

To me, it's a lot more plausible that an infinity of observers have the ability to perceive any given image by some means we don't understand than it is for a single point to transmit an infinity of images by a process that we do.

 

Footnote: Speaking of the infinitude of things, it is awesome to think that an image projected from the light of a star is refreshed anywhere from the width of a photon to infinity, depending on how you look at these things, and then sent out in minisculely different versions in an infinitude of directions to the expectant telescopes of eager Astronomers the Galaxy over. I read an article recently about a camera developed out of MIT that captures a trillion images per second.

Strange to think that a Photon moves almost exactly one foot in a trillionth of a second, and that we are approaching a time when we can capture its image.