In the last decade a new variety of nature inspired optimization algorithms has been appeared. After the swarm based models, researchers turned their inspiration in nature phenomena and laws of science. In this way a new category of algorithms was born, equally effective or even sometimes superior to known algorithms for optimization problems, like genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence schemes. The present survey depicts the evolution of research on nature inspired optimization algorithms related to physical phenomena and laws of science and discusses the possibilities of using the presented approaches in a number of different applications. An attempt has been made to draw conclusions on what algorithm could be used in which different problem areas, for those approaches that this information could be extracted from the related papers studied. The paper also underlines the usage of this kind of nature inspired algorithms in industrial research problems, due to their better confrontation with optimization problems represented with nodes and edges.