[roesel]

I think using the term "re-emit" is a mistake on my part. I fully agree that the photons are not absorbed and re-emitted.

However, their speed of propagation in the material, and their properties can be altered by the interaction with dipole moments of the material. Therefore, photons do indeed "go trough without collision" but not without interaction. The dipoles in a dielectric material such as glass need to take the energy to oscillate from the field, and then they give it back to the field by radiating it out again.

I agree that this is not "re-emission" in the absorption/emission diagram sense, and I understand that the field in a material cannot be separated into the material portion and the vacuum portion, since it is both at any given time, but what I have tried to outline in the previous comment is still a useful representation of the role of the material which the original article chose to leave out. I should have used "radiate" and "dipole" instead of "emit" and "electron" to make it a bit clearer.