Pages

Friday, October 20, 2006

Nature

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.Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis, 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 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.

Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness – wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention.


Halloween Costumes

No comments: