  When a system is brought to a metastable state, nuclei of the equilibrium
phase form and grow. This is the well-known nucleation and growth of
first-order phase transitions. Near a critical point of a continuous phase
transition, critical phenomena such as critical opalescence characterized by
universal scaling emerge. These two sets of behavior are so completely
different that it might appear absurd to ask whether nucleation and growth
exhibit even a slight universal scaling. Here we show that universal scaling is
indeed manifested in standard nucleation and growth by introducing a
non-universal initial time to a recently proposed method. This generalizes the
method and provides a different perspective for studying universal scaling
behavior and hence universality classes of nucleation and growth.
