[ggggtez]

I think this is called, "knowing enough to be dangerous". You clearly have some understanding of light, but you are missing some key facts that would lead you to the correct understanding.

>Light can reflect off of transparent crystals

No, the point of the above post is that a photon is not "reflected", but captured and re-transmitted by photo-electric effect.

Light travels at maximum speed C, only when in a vacuum. Otherwise it travels through a medium. We can see that the different speeds of light cause dispersion such as when it enters and leaves a clear prism (changing mediums, thus spreading out the different speeds/wavelengths of light). Since we know that light is "traveling in a medium" when it travels in air or in the prism, then what do we mean by this? It is traveling slower, so it must have some information about the medium...

So how does the light "know" it's in a material, without interacting with the atoms of the material?

Of course, it couldn't know. It is interacting with the material. The behavior of the particle is fully explained by the photo-electric effect.

[whatshisface]

Absorption and emission are not the only two processes by which light can interact with matter, reflection is another. The argument is that if the material can't store the energy then you can't really call the event an absorption. Feynman diagrams aren't sequences of events so just because you see the photon coming to, disappearing, and then departing an electron doesn't mean it happens in that order.