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.
Where did you get this? In modern cryptanalysis, it's counted as a win for the cryptanalyst if he or she can find any pattern in the ciphertext (i.e., give an algorithm that can distinguish a ciphertext from a random string with probability > .5). But even when this is true, it's usually not the case that one can then go on to infer the full key or plaintext.
I oversimplified there [1], but even with your corrected phrasing of the situation, that suggests some room for cryptanalysis-based improvement in science, because finding any pattern distinguishable from randomness is a win for science as well.
Given that nature does not deliberately or intelligently add the entropy that halfway-decent ciphers add, then the patterns belonging to the weaker, lower-entropy set of observable data that nature is limited to should be a much easier problem for cryptanalysts than the ciphers they normally try to attack.
In other w... (read more)