Do you think that code-breakers are likely to have anything to teach scientists? I am having visions of taking code-breaking software, inputting scientific data, and unraveling the secrets of the universe.
So am I (albeit maybe in a more limited sense). I created this topic to find out if any crypto experts here noticed any of the parallels I did. Seeing as they are skeptical about the possibility that code-breakers have anything to teach scientists, I think I'll have to develop this idea more before I can be more justified in believing they do or don't.
In particular, I'll want to make the mappings between the plaintext and ciphertext to their science analogs more explicit. Also, I'll want to design ciphers based on physical laws and see how code-breakers would infer the cipher (both in cases scientists have solved and those they haven't).
I first thought that this would require (the very difficult task of) basing a trapdoor one-way function on a physical law, but now I don't think so, because I needn't make it a public key algorithm -- a pure private key cryptosystem (on the assumption Alice and Bob have securely shared the cipher and key) would work as well, as cryptanalysts can break many of these kinds of system. And those kinds (like the Caesar cipher) don't involve a trapdoor one-way function.
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.