Lesagian gravity redux?

The old Le Sage’s hypothesis on the corpuscular origin of gravity is revisited. The discussion
is developed along three lines: the "modern" wave approach, a "mass–flux" model of a relativistic
fluid, and the traditional corpuscular model. The predictions obtained in all the three approaches
are convergent with other current attempts. The main outcomes are the emergence of a maximal
gravitational acceleration – compatible with the surface gravity of neutron stars – and the absence of
gravitational field divergences for arbitrarily large or collapsed masses. The resulting theory differs
from classical Newtonian gravity in its much clearer separation between the concepts of heavy mass and
inert mass, a distinctive characteristic of the Le Sage-type (or “shadow gravity” or “Push–Gravity”
(PG)) theories. The price to pay is the abandonment of the equivalence principle in its weak form,
which might no longer be considered rigorously valid. We will only touch on the issue of experimental
verification, which remains very difficult: the simple test we propose here is a rough estimate of
gravity at the Earth’s equator and poles using PG theory, which indicates only qualitative agreement
with experimental data. Finally, a cosmological speculation based on Le Sage’s idea is sketched, which
is discussed at a preliminary and tentative level.