I like this guy already. He already is getting Huffington Post mad. He made some sort of contribution to an organization that aims to teach kids about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theory. Huffington Post takes the position that science is science and there is no quality spectrum within it, so wear your fucking mask. These real scientists are making Huffington Post come to terms with the fact that their version of pro-science dogma is unscientific in culture. From what I understand he is saying there is an interaction between matter and empty space that gives rise to gravity, and that the more empty space there is the more gravity result a particle produces. If he was simply saying that empty space has its own mass then that would not be sufficient because points outside the galaxy would pull equal to the extra sources of gravity inside a galaxy. You may say, but only matter beneath a considered sphere matters. That is true for genuinely spherical or circular arrangement. If you imagine a field of uniform particles gravity would not point in any specific way even though you can draw spheres of consideration all over the place. This explanation would be more useful than dark matter anyway because dark matter doesn't solve the mass distribution problem generally. Galaxies rotate closer to how we think they should in the center and middle, and too fast around the outside. Essentially there is a angular velocity curve for a given distance from the center of the galaxy that doesn't match what we would expect from the expected or observed matter distribution of a galaxy. One would almost expect that dark matter would have a similar distribution, itself being impacted kinetically by gravity. But for some reason it maintains a less concentrated distribution to explain why the outer portion of the galaxy experiences more gravity and the middle doesn't. Suggesting that particles produce more field when around less matter would explain the middle bands producing more gravity than the center with respect to expectation thus providing more mass for outer bands to be attracted to. This still seems very general relativity like. He is saying there is increased entropy and information in these situations, which is feeding into an Einstein explanation for the curvature of space time. Verlinde is saying that a particle produces more entropy where there is more space.