Carbon Atoms: More Quantum Weirdness?

Quantum physics, otherwise known as quantum mechanics, is weird and downright counter-intuitive. However, you don’t have to read a textbook on quantum anomalies in order to come to terms with high strangeness. Just do a thought experiment with your everyday run-of-the-mill carbon atoms.

As we all are aware, collections of carbon atoms comes in various forms. There's graphite, coal (minus all impurities), diamonds, and even Bucky-balls.

As we are also well aware of, the space inside of atoms is mainly empty space, to the tune of 99.99% empty space. If you think of Yankee Stadium as an atom, a fly would be the nucleus on the pitcher's mound, and the electrons a tiny swarm of gnats out there in the upper deck and bleachers.

Now say we have a 1 mm thick chunk of graphite, coal, diamond and a Bucky-ball structure.

Into those we fire a single wavelength of light - lots and lots of photons - from within the visible spectrum. After all we want to see what's happening.

All the photons are identical; the photons have no electrical charge or other electromagnetic (EM) properties that will react with the various chunks or parts of the carbon atoms. The photons either hit or miss.

Commonsense would dictate that nearly all the photons should pass right through the carbon structures, being mostly empty space and all, just like if you spray BB-gun pellets around Yankee Stadium you're rather unlikely to hit the fly or the gnats, even if you line up hundreds and hundreds of Yankee Stadiums in a row, each with one fly and a few gnats.

Now the surprise is that despite the fact that 99.99% of your carbon blocks, each 1 mm thick, are just void, your beam of photons aren't going to pass clear through. The coal and the graphite are opaque*. Well that's odd. Even odder, that other solid structure, the diamond, is not opaque but transparent. It's still a 1 mm thick bunch of just carbon atoms, but somehow this time the photons mostly make it through. But, and there's always a ‘but’, that presents another oddity.

The oddity is that some photons reflect off of the outer surface of the diamond; some reflect off of the back inside surface and while some of those immediately exit, some bounce around inside for a while before exiting; and some photons just pass straight through and don't reflect off any surface of the diamond. That's odd since all the carbon atoms are the same; all of the photons are the same; and there's only the one wavelength being fired. It's an enigma when you have identical scenarios with different outcomes.

The question is, how do each of the identical photons 'know' whether to reflect off the outer surface of the diamond, pass through the outer surface and reflect off of the inner surface, or pass straight through as if the diamond didn't exist at all?

*I'm not exactly sure what transpires with the Bucky-balls never having any to muck around with.