It’s a visual illustration, no? Visually this looks rather strong (Figures 1 and 2 on pages 16-17).
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
And I do think that China might have enough research manpower to just routinely reproduce all published findings of this kind of experiments if they want to (I don’t know if they actually do that; I would not be too surprised if they do that as a routine though; this depends on what are their actual policies; I have no means to investigate that).
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
Yes, an independent reproduction would also evaluate if their methodology is actually good in this sense (I can imagine all kinds of methodological “underwater stones”).
I did not mean to give an impression that I had made up my mind about the outcome of this potential further exploration. I had made up my mind that it’s worth further exploration, but I would not predict the results. Unfortunately, it is not all that easy to arrange (we do know that neutral prior here is important, rather than someone heavily leaning towards one side doing it, because there is always room for pushing results towards this or that direction; for example, I’ve spent too much “quality time” with this paper to be considered a fully neutral person, although I would certainly make an effort to avoid the bias if I were to do this work; then one might be unsure how safe it would be to publish on this, even today, and so on).
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
They would report to the government (if the order to reproduce things comes from the government). The government would decide what to make public and what to keep for more restricted use. It’s very natural (especially if the subject is potentially “dual-use”, or, at least, is considered relevant to national defense).
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
Yes, an independent reproduction would also evaluate if their methodology is actually good in this sense (I can imagine all kinds of methodological “underwater stones”).
I did not mean to give an impression that I had made up my mind about the outcome of this potential further exploration. I had made up my mind that it’s worth further exploration, but I would not predict the results. Unfortunately, it is not all that easy to arrange (we do know that neutral prior here is important, rather than someone heavily leaning towards one side doing it, because there is always room for pushing results towards this or that direction; for example, I’ve spent too much “quality time” with this paper to be considered a fully neutral person, although I would certainly make an effort to avoid the bias if I were to do this work; then one might be unsure how safe it would be to publish on this, even today, and so on).
They would report to the government (if the order to reproduce things comes from the government). The government would decide what to make public and what to keep for more restricted use. It’s very natural (especially if the subject is potentially “dual-use”, or, at least, is considered relevant to national defense).