We propose a physical reframing under which gravity and entropy are revealed as the same phenomenon viewed through different vocabularies. Gravitational binding energy, in this picture, is entropy held in escrow against the local Unruh temperature: bound mass-pairs hold entropy off the books, and the universe attracts because the books want to balance. Escape velocity is the threshold at which sufficient compensating entropy can be produced to redeem the escrow. The equivalence principle is the statement that escrow gradients are observer-relative the same way entropy is observer-relative, with tidal forces emerging as the irreducible piece that survives transformation to a free-fall frame. Black holes are the limiting case in which escrow becomes infinite and is forced to manifest directly as horizon area, recovering Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a structural consequence rather than a separate result. The mathematical machinery underlying the reframing is due to Bekenstein, Hawking, Unruh, Jacobson, Padmanabhan, Verlinde, and van Putten; we claim no priority on individual derivations. What is offered here is the picture that connects them: universal attractiveness, the impossibility of shielding, the second-law character of gravitational binding, the area-law of black hole entropy, and the recovery of Newton's law and of the order of magnitude and universality of the empirical Milgrom acceleration scale a₀ all follow from one principle. We sketch a covariant extension and engage honestly with the empirical literature, including the constraints on cosmological evolution of a₀ established by Milgrom (2017) and the radial-profile pattern of cluster mass discrepancies, both of which any framework in this family must accommodate.
Grant Lavell Whitmer III (Fri,) studied this question.