Gravitational Entropy Escrow: An Interpretive Synthesis of Thermodynamic Approaches to Gravity

We propose a physical reframing under which gravity and entropy appear as the same phenomenon in different vocabularies. Gravitational binding energy 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 must balance. Escape is the threshold at which enough compensating entropy can be produced to redeem the escrow; black holes are the limiting case in which escrow becomes infinite and manifests as horizon area, recovering Bekenstein–Hawking entropy structurally. The mathematical machinery is due to Bekenstein, Hawking, Unruh, Jacobson, Padmanabhan, Verlinde, and van Putten; we claim no priority on individual derivations. What is offered is the picture connecting them: universal attractiveness, the impossibility of shielding, the second-law character of binding, the black-hole area law, and the recovery of Newton's law and of the order of magnitude and universality of the Milgrom acceleration scale a0 all follow from one principle. We sketch a covariant extension and engage honestly with the empirical literature—including Milgrom's (2017) constraints on the cosmological evolution of a0 and the radial-profile pattern of cluster mass discrepancies—that any framework in this family must accommodate. The origin of the order-unity coefficient in a0 remains the central open problem.