Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The term generally does not include manufactured objects and human interaction unless qualified in ways such as, e.g., "human nature" or "the whole of nature". Nature is also generally distinguished from the spiritual or supernatural. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.

The word "nature" derives from the Latin word natura, or "the course of things, natural character."www.etymologyonline.com ( Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the innate way in which plants and animals grow of their own accord, and to the Greek word for plants generally. The first known use of physis is in Homer's Iliad, in reference to the intrinsic qualities of a plant. Later uses expanded to the "inherent" or "innate" character of things in general. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is a more recent development that gained increasingly wide use with the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), for example, is translated "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", and reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature".The etymology of the word "physical" shows its use as a synonym for "natural" in about the mid-15th century: [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=physical