Any chance this thing is using dark matter as reaction mass? We're confident that dark matter exists because it's the only thing that perfectly explains the evidence from gravitational lensing of colliding galaxies (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster ). Finding a way to interact with dark matter sounds much more plausible than breaking thermodynamics.
Please read where the "dark matter" term came from. It's not a faerie dust
that facilitates magic use. It's just a hypothetical matter in the universe
that we can't observe, because for some yet-unknown reason it doesn't emit
light. There's no reason it can't be just regular matter.
Neutrinos don't interect with EM either, so just being "dark" is not outside of well established physics. The only thing strange about "dark matter" is not that it is dark (eg, not interacting with the electromagnetic force), but that none of the dark particles we already know about can explain the effects that we attribute to dark matter.
According to Verlinde, there is no dark matter. Tell me how he's wrong point-by-point. Just because gravity is emergent doesn't mean it still cannot have effects similar to what's been perhaps wrongly attributed to dark matter. You can't just say "Bullet Cluster" and "Dragonfly 44" and piss all over it without explanation.
I'm in no way qualified to give any technical judgement on Verlinde's paper, but I'm aware that modified theories of gravity have been around for a long time without much success. Of course I'd like it if some elegant theory could be found that fit the evidence better than dark matter, but going by past attempts I'm not anticipating this one will.
