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.
"as many patterns in the ciphertext as you can" is too vague to be useful.
If it were specific, I doubt we have any such methods. What makes you think that we do?
I was basically saying (tautologically) that we can break any cipher except for the ones where we can't. So if you use any of those broken ciphers, an attacker can infer the cipher, key, or plaintext, to the extent that it's possible.
My non-tautological inference, then, is that nature isn't able to intelligently design ciphers, and so her patterns should be much easier for a cryptographer to discern than those that exist in many human-designed ciphers. A good cipher destroys the patterns that would otherwise clue in the attacker on the key or plaintext, ... (read more)