Overview
The term "natural science" is used to distinguish them from the formal sciences such as mathematics and logic, studying the properties of theoretical models themselves; from the humanities, which critically compare different artifacts of human culture and different cultures themselves; as well as from social sciences, including economics, which seek to construct simplified quantitative rules governing complex human behavior and social patterns.
There are five branches of natural science: astronomy, biology, chemistry, the Earth sciences and physics. This distinguishes sciences that cover inquiry into the world of nature from humanities such as linguistics, anthropology, literary science, and from formal sciences such as mathematics and logic. Despite their differences, these sciences sometimes overlap. For example, the social sciences and biology both study human beings as organisms while mathematics is used regularly in all the natural sciences.
Alongside its traditional usage, natural science may encompass natural history, which emerged in the 16th century and focused on the description and classification of plants, animals, minerals and other natural objects. Today, natural history refers to observational descriptions of the natural world aimed at popular audiences rather than an academic ones. The natural sciences are sometimes referred to colloquially as hard science, or fields seen as relying on experimental, quantifiable data or the scientific method and focusing on accuracy and objectivity. These usually include physics, chemistry and biology. By contrast, soft science is used as a pejorative term to describe fields more reliant on qualitative research, including the social sciences.
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