Lesagian gravity redux?

The old Le Sage’s hypothesis on the corpuscular origin of gravity is revisited. The discussionis developed along three lines: the "modern" wave approach, a "mass–flux" model of a relativisticfluid, and the traditional corpuscular model. The predictions obtained in all the three approachesare convergent with other current attempts. The main outcomes are the emergence of a maximalgravitational acceleration – compatible with the surface gravity of neutron stars – and the absence ofgravitational field divergences for arbitrarily large or collapsed masses. The resulting theory differsfrom classical Newtonian gravity in its much clearer separation between the concepts of heavy mass andinert 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 experimentalverification, which remains very difficult: the simple test we propose here is a rough estimate ofgravity at the Earth’s equator and poles using PG theory, which indicates only qualitative agreementwith experimental data. Finally, a cosmological speculation based on Le Sage’s idea is sketched, whichis discussed at a preliminary and tentative level. This version 01a contains amendments to theprevious version 01.