the.com/law of nature

means A description of how the physical world reliably behaves — like gravity or thermodynamics — that holds everywhere, for everyone, with no opt-out clause.

from From Latin lex naturae, a phrase stitched together by medieval and classical thinkers who borrowed 'law' (lex) from human courts and legislatures and applied it to the cosmos itself — the idea being that nature, like a well-run society, follows fixed rules. The concept splits into two tangled cousins over time: 'natural law' as moral philosophy (what humans ought to do, reasoned from nature) and 'laws of nature' as science (what matter and energy actually do, no choice involved). The scientific sense hardened during the era of Newton and his contemporaries, when describing the universe in terms of precise, discoverable 'laws' became the whole point of the exercise.