And it is remarkably consistent at doing that.
But when you think about light’s speed in medium it seems like absorption and re emission which shifts light’s net velocity. The speed of light between the interaction is still c. That becomes obvious if you zoom into matter and find its mostly empty likr vaccum
No, that’s not really a useful way of modeling it for the case of light traveling through a linear medium.
The absorption/re-emission model implicitly localizes the photons, which is problematic — think about it in an uncertainty principle (or diffraction limit) picture: it implies that the momentum is highly uncertain, which means that the light would get absorbed but re-emitted in every direction, which doesn’t happen. So instead you can make arguments about it being a delocalized photon and being absorbed and re-emitted coherently across the material, but this isn’t really the same thing as the “ping pong balls stopping and starting again” model.
Another problem is to ask why the light doesn’t change color in a (linear) medium — because if it’s getting absorbed and re-emitted, and is not hitting a nice absorption line, why wouldn’t it change energy by exchanging with the environment/other degrees of freedom? (The answer is it does do this — it’s called Raman scattering, but that is generally a very weak effect.)
The absorption/emission picture does work for things like fluorescence. But Maxwell’s equations, the Schrödinger equation, QED — these are wave equations.
Yes, but light always travels at the speed of light, regardless of its speed. It travels at c in a vacuum.
Light is never late, nor is it early, it arrives precisely when it means to.
