An Entropic Origin of Dark Matter Phenomenology in Galaxies

The nature of dark matter remains one of the most persistent open problems in modern physics. While the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm successfully accounts for large-scale cosmological observations, galactic-scale phenomena reveal striking empirical regularities that are difficult to reconcile with collisionless particle dark matter alone. In particular, the Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR) uncovered by high-quality galaxy rotation curves exhibits a remarkably tight coupling between baryonic and total accelerations, suggesting the presence of an underlying organizing principle. In this work, we propose that the phenomenology commonly attributed to dark matter arises from a universal entropic constraint associated with mass itself. Building on a generalized entropic bound that links rest-mass energy to a minimum operational entropy cost, we formulate the Universal Entropic Mass Principle (UEMP) and show that it leads to an emergent acceleration term naturally reproducing the observed RAR without invoking non-baryonic matter. We confront this framework with multiple independent datasets and observables, including the SPARC database of galactic rotation curves, statistical universality tests of the characteristic acceleration scale, and gravitational lensing measurements. These results suggest that dark matter phenomenology at galactic scales may reflect a universal entropic response of the gravitational environment to baryonic mass, rather than the presence of an unseen particle component.