In 2009, Erik Verlinde proposed a conceptual model that describes gravity as an entropic force. He argues (similar to Jacobsons result) that gravity is a consequence of the "information associated with the positions of material bodies". This model combines the thermodynamic approach to gravity with Gerard t Hoofts holographic principle. It implies that gravity is not a fundamental interaction, but an emergent phenomenon which arises from the statistical behavior of microscopic degrees of freedom encoded on a holographic screen.  The paper drew a variety of responses from the scientific community. Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said "Some people have said it cant be right, others that it's right and we already knew it – that it’s right and profound, right and trivial."
In July 2011, Verlinde presented the further development of his ideas in a contribution to the Strings 2011 conference, including an explanation for the origin of dark matter.
Verlinde's article also attracted a large amount of media exposure, and led to immediate follow-up work in cosmology, the dark energy hypothesis, cosmological acceleration, cosmological inflation, and loop quantum gravity. Also, a specific microscopic model has been proposed that indeed leads to entropic gravity emerging at large scales. Entropic gravity can emerge from quantum entanglement of local Rindler horizons.