suppose a camera were constructed that would take a
360 degree panoramic picture of the flash , the film itself
stretched 360 degrees around the flash so that as the light
sphere reached the film the film would capture the image from
all directions that the light flash traveled in.
would there be a constant line on the film of the
captured image or a single dot?
you wouldn't really need a camera at all just a roll of
unexposed film stretched around the flash point , it might need to be unrolled in a circle around the flash point while
inside a dark room to avoid pre-exposure to any light source
before the single photon light flash is executed.
Now you are really thinking like a scientist and the answer for a single photon is a single dot.
Do you get that if that wasn't so your eye wouldn't work because you would see each photon across the entire eye? Look again at your answer above, your eye is only probably 120-180 degree but it meets that
exact criteria you just described. The back of eye is basically a 3D hemisphere version of a rolled out film and exactly what you described.
So how can you see an individual point of light on your eye. The lense could bring the wave to a one of single point (like using a magnifying glass to burn things) but it cant create dots across an area ... see the problem? So put two points of light how does you eye see two individual points in your idea above, they should flood the entire eye and join together just like you say should happen to the film.
So if I accept your answer then I can't see
As I said there is nothing wrong with your spherical wave idea you just have to accept it collapses and you will get the right result which matches experiment. At school they just hack the result and talk about wave/particle duality to avoid discussing this collapse situation.
The answer isn't obvious in classical physics but you can see there aren't really any other choices. Like it or not any simple experiment throws up this problem and the naive answer is wrong because of conservation of energy.
This is what makes teaching light to layman hard, you see Marosz fall down this hole continually. All this stuff is dead easy to test and has been done since 17th century. The problem was formally solved in 1855 by James Maxwell although the collapse part had some time before its significance became obvious.
