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by lutusp 4319 days ago
They don't. But the re-emitted photons become part of a coherent wavefront through what Richard P. Feynman called a Path Integral:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation

So the reason you have a coherent wavefront moving through a lens, as one example, is not because the photons are emitted in a particular direction, but at a particular time.