Eli5 : how does light from a light source spread?

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There are rules like the the inverse square law, where it it often visualized that light travels in rays.
At first the rays are a lot and really dense, the further away the object it hits is, the lesser rays will hit it because it spreads harder than the object is big.

Now with the logic of a watering can. If the water streams would always spread the same amount, there should be places that never get hit by water depending on the distance of the object.

Can this happen with light? Are there blind spots of light even without any direct obstacle? Or does light travel like a wave hitting the shore, without gaps or something? I always wondered

Edit :This is super informative and interesting thank you alot Champs!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

[This neat diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inverse_square_law.svg) from Wikipedia might help.

Our light source is sending out individual packets of light (photons) at random, in random directions. If we just look at those hitting the square at distance “r”, each photon will hit the target square. However when we get to distance “2r” there is only a 1 in 4 chance that our photon will hit any one square. By “3r” there is a 1 in 9 chance that our photon will hit any one of the squares.

So it isn’t that there are blind spots, more that the chance of a photon hitting our target area gets lower the further out we go.

Remember that the “rays” or lines in that diagram are for illustrating things only. We are really looking at a steady stream of individual photons shooting out from the light source in random directions. So it isn’t like our watering can where there are certain ‘fixed’ streams of water coming out of fixed holes. More like a watering can where the entire nozzle was open, but each droplet of water picked its own random direction to head out in.

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