Category:Push Gravity

This category collects push gravity theories — accounts in which gravity is not an attraction at all, but the net residual push of an isotropic flux impinging on bodies from all directions, with each body shadowing the other.

The idea is due to Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1690) and Georges-Louis Le Sage (1748), whose "ultra-mundane corpuscles" give the theory its other common name, Le Sage gravitation. Its attraction is that it is mechanical and causal: gravity acts by contact, propagates at a finite (though possibly superluminal) speed, and follows an inverse-square law naturally from geometry.

The classical objections are equally well known: the flux should produce drag on moving bodies, and the absorbed momentum should heat them to destruction. Modern advocates — including Tom Van Flandern, Matthew R Edwards and contributors to the Le Sage revival literature — address these by adjusting the properties of the flux, and argue in return that a mechanical account is preferable to a geometrical one that explains nothing. See also Category:Gravity and Category:Antigravity.