I don't think you're giving enough credit to the author of this summary by calling it "breathless." His conclusion is:
This is how science works. Ideas are proposed, they are backed up, they are shot down. Over time, it would not surprise me to see Verlinde defend his work. Perhaps Kobakhidze's derivation and its extension to the microscopic case is incorrect. Perhaps Verlinde will revisit his original work to revise how microscopic cases should be handled. Whatever happens, science will move on; time, further arguments, and experiments will be the ultimate arbiter of which drastically different view of reality is correct.
I think this article has two purposes: explain a new, untested theory, and demonstrate how science works in practice. He links to, and discusses, two papers that refute the theory. You call that a "sheepish admission," but I think that was one of his goals.
"In this article, we are going to look at a manuscript that purports to overturn hundreds of years of accepted ideas about gravity, and use it as an illustration of how controversial ideas are dealt with in modern physics."
I don't think you can be any more up front than that. It's not a sheepish admission, it's the whole point of the article. Ars are trying to highlight exactly the problems you're talking about.
> I don't think you're giving enough credit to the author of this summary by calling it "breathless."
I think you're right -- on rereading I shouldn't be laying the smackdown on the Ars article: he does use the paper as an example of the scientific process at work. Nonetheless I think that by advertising a paper which hasn't been through peer review, he's promoting it. It'd have been a lot better if he told his story with an example which has already gone through the cycle of being proposed, shot down, and buried.
This is how science works. Ideas are proposed, they are backed up, they are shot down. Over time, it would not surprise me to see Verlinde defend his work. Perhaps Kobakhidze's derivation and its extension to the microscopic case is incorrect. Perhaps Verlinde will revisit his original work to revise how microscopic cases should be handled. Whatever happens, science will move on; time, further arguments, and experiments will be the ultimate arbiter of which drastically different view of reality is correct.
I think this article has two purposes: explain a new, untested theory, and demonstrate how science works in practice. He links to, and discusses, two papers that refute the theory. You call that a "sheepish admission," but I think that was one of his goals.