Thanks for taking the time to explain this. I don't pretend to fully understand it yet, but it leads me to many more questions, which I deeply enjoy.

I see, so in nature, an unpolarized atom in an atomic gas may be absorbing and emitting resonant frequencies, emitting each individual photon "in one direction" but in a random direction. Given enough time, and enough absorption/emission cycles, the emission pattern would appear as a random, or "all- directional" distribution (isotropic distribution).

As a thought experiment, if the atom was contained in a chamber with 4 walls, each wall being a photon detector capable of detecting the x, y coordinate of any photon that impacts the wall, and a beam of photons resonant with the atom was directed at the atom, the walls would eventually look like equally distributed swiss cheese, and eventually being 100% covered, but only after a sufficient period of time. One wall would detect the first emission at a specific x,y coordinate on the wall, and then the next emission would be detected sequentially, randomly by either that or another wall, and the process would continue until the photon beam stops.

So the atom is not in fact acting as a point-source "isotropic radiator" during re-emission (as I understood it being described in the linked video), whereby if you impact the atom with a single photon, then all 4 walls of our detection chamber would simultaneously detect the re-emission.of energy.

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it.

Maybe my assumption is wrong. Can you tell me if it is true or not that an atom acts as an "isotropic radiator" upon "spontaneous emission" of a previously absorbed photon?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropic_radiator#:~:text=An%20isotropic%20radiator%20is%20a,sphere%20centred%20on%20the%20source.

Here is where I ran across this:

See at 6:24 to 6:40 of this clip... https://youtu.be/SDqCx4FiJSo