• Question: What is nature?

    Asked by zebrachic96 to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Monica, Philip on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: James M Monk

      James M Monk answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      To some extent everything is nature – when physicists talk about “nature” they mean the Universe and how things in the Universe interact. Even man-made things are natural from this viewpoint because humans are a naturally occurring phenomenon.

      Theorists sometimes also talk about a theory or model being “unnatural” if it requires the parameters of the model to be tuned very specifically in order to allow the model to make sense.

    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      That’s right, I guess that in everyday language “nature” often means just wildlife, but in physics we use it to mean the whole physical world, as in “the laws of nature”.

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