Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde published a manuscript to the arXiv that purports to explain why science cannot reconcile all four fundamental forces. According to him, it is simple: “gravity doesn’t exist.”

Black hole thermodynamics was worked on extensively in the 1970s. It’s needed in order to reconcile the second law of thermodynamics with the idea of a black hole event horizon. To do this, one has to admit that a black hole must have finite, non-zero entropy. If a black hole has zero entropy, then throwing mass into a black hole would violate the second law of thermodynamics, as the sum total entropy of the universe would decrease by the amount of entropy contained within the mass.

This also demands that, oddly, black holes cannot be purely black. If something has a non-zero entropy, then it must also have a non-zero temperature. This temperature is the temperature of the Hawking radiation that is given off due to the quantum nature of the black hole itself.
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Clearly, one paper making extraordinary claims will not be taken as fact until others can replicate the work, or in the case of a theoretical paper such as this, verify it with experimental evidence. A paper published in a recent edition of Physical Review D has attempted to do just that.
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Dr. Archil Kobakhidze, a research fellow in theoretical particle physics at the University of Melbourne, points to recent results that may undermine Verlinde’s ideas. Kobakhidze acknowledges that Verlinde’s work successfully reproduces gravity on the Newtonian scale, and possibly in the more general relativistic sense, but it must also work at the quantum level as well, or it’s not going to change modern physics.
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This is how science works. Ideas are proposed, they are backed up, they are shot down. Over time, it would not surprise me to see Verlinde defend his work. Perhaps Kobakhidze’s derivation and its extension to the microscopic case is incorrect. Perhaps Verlinde will revisit his original work to revise how microscopic cases should be handled. Whatever happens, science will move on; time, further arguments, and experiments will be the ultimate arbiter of which drastically different view of reality is correct.