Hey, we have cryptanalytic methods that can infer any cipher, key, or plaintext unless you intelligently destroy as many patterns in the ciphertext as you can.
I don't think this is true for ciphers that are anywhere near as complicated as the physical world is. For inferring models of limited complexity on limited numbers of variables in constrained form, however, there're some pretty good algorithms in Pearl's book Causality, based on conditional correlation and independence.
I don't think this is true for ciphers that are anywhere near as complicated as the physical world is
Right -- I tried to make clear that my concern is only about those phenomena that are less complex that the most complex broken cipher. For unknown-physical-law cases (i.e. we don't even know the dynamics of the phenomenon), the comparison is to ciphers that can be broken even if you don't know which cipher or public key is being used; for unknown-constants cases (where we know the form of the equations), that also includes ciphers requiring knowledge o...
Short version: Why can't cryptanalysis methods be carried over to science, which looks like a trivial problem by comparison, since nature doesn't intelligently remove patterns from our observations? Or are these methods already carried over?
Long version: Okay, I was going to spell this all out with a lot of text, but it started ballooning, so I'm just going to put it in chart form.
Here is what I see as the mapping from cryptography to science (or epistemology in general). I want to know what goes in the "???" spot, and why it hasn't been used for any natural phenomenon less complex than the most complex broken cipher. (Sorry, couldn't figure out how to center it.)
EDIT: Removed "(cipher known)" requirement on 2nd- and 3rd-to-last rows because the scientific analog can be searching for either natural laws or constants.