I've been reading the book "Geometric Mechancis" by Darryl Holm and the in the first chapter he treats geometric optics. There the author talks about light rays and those light rays looks like trajectories as of particles as we consider in Classical Mechanics. The first thing that the author state is Fermat's principle that seems to define one action and then determine the path that light follows (i.e. the light ray) being the one which extremizes the action.
In all of that discussion, it seemed to me that geometric optics is then all about treating light not as a wave, but rather as a collection of particles. Is that it? In geometric optics we should think of light as a collection of particles?
In that setting, a light ray is just the path followed by one such particle, or is it composed by many particles?
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