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.
Question to anyone who knows something about cryptanalysis:
I write a message in Klingon to a friend. You intercept it. You've never heard of the Klingon language before and have no information about it whatsoever. Is it possible to "decrypt" the message and produce an English translation, assuming that the message is long enough?
In other words, is it possible "in principle" for the Imperial Japanese to have deciphered the messages sent by the Navajo code talkers without having access to a Navajo speaker?
Seconded, I've wondered the same thing myself and voiced similar concerns here.
It has always perplexed me how WWII US cryptographers managed to get anything done, when the plaintext still looks like gibberish -- further complicated by a novel encoding betweeen a non-western script and EM signals.
My partial answer is this: you would not be able to accomplish anything unless you know something about the real-world referents of the code. So you'll have to do something like a known-plaintext attack. For example:
Send 3 planes to Island A, listen to enemy's ch... (read more)