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 words, when it comes to injecting entropy into ciphertexts, nature couldn't hold a candle to even the easily-broken ciphers. Right?
[1] To be precise, it would have to be something more tautologous like, "For a given cryptanalytic goal, the best cryptanalytic methods can meet that goal for a cipher with the level of complexity in the most complex cipher broken for that goal and all ciphers of lower complexity."
I'd say that science and cryptanalysis both share the ideal of (or can be viewed as) trying to approximate Bayesian updating on a Solomonoff prior. In cryptanalysis, you have the disadvantage that your opponent is intelligent and malicious (from your perspective), but you have the advantage that the encryption process doesn't have much computing power (since ciphers have to be fast to minimize computing costs). In science, nature is not malicious, but it's not limited in computing power either. Yes, they are basically similar, but each is specialized to its domain of inquiry, so I doubt science can learn much from cryptanalysis.
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.