Does Mass Carry Entropic Content? The Universal Entropic Mass Principle (UEMP).

This work presents the hypothesis that physical mass is not a purely primitive attribute, but carries a minimum entropic content associated with the stabilization of degrees of freedom in spacetime. From this postulate formalized as the Universal Entropic Mass Principle (UEMP) an operational thermodynamic framework is developed in which gravity, the phenomenology commonly attributed to dark matter, and the accelerated expansion of the Universe emerge as macroscopic consequences of the accumulation and redistribution of this entropic content. The formalism is directly tested across multiple physical regimes. In the galactic regime, we use observational data from 175 galaxies of the SPARC catalogue, showing that rotation dynamics are reproduced without the introduction of dark matter particles. At late cosmological scales, the growth of structures (f₈) imposes direct constraints on the clustering fraction of the entropic sector. In the primordial regime, we show that the primary CMB is recovered in the limit of maximal entropic efficiency, while inflation is interpreted as a transient phase of accelerated expansion associated with informational dissipation. Additionally, baryogenesis is parametrized in a minimal and falsifiable manner through an effective entropic bias. In the quantum regime, tests of local position invariance with Rb/Cs atomic clocks impose direct bounds on microscopic corrections to the formalism. Taken together, these tests indicate that the UEMP provides an operationally unified framework in which gravity, dark-matter-like phenomenology, and cosmic acceleration arise from a single entropic postulate, remaining empirically testable and compatible with current data, and recovering standard cosmology as a well-defined effective limit.