Can raytracing be used to imitate the behavior of light to a higher degree?
You are late by about 35 years. This was addressed in the historical paper "Whitted, T., An improved illumination model for shaded display. Communications of the ACM, Volume 23 Issue 6, June 1980, Pages 343-349", using  ray tracing.



Since then radiosity has been introduced to better deal with diffuse phenomena. Correct physical modeling of the image formation process was discussed six years later in the seminal "Kajiya, James T. (1986), "The rendering equation", Siggraph 1986: 143".