Finding the Source of the Nile: The Scientific Method
The scientific method describes the way in which scientists reduce the influence of bias when testing a hypothesis or theory. Below is an outline of the idealized Scientific Method, as many people assume science has been done for generations.
- Make objective observations
- Develop a hypothesis (explanation)
- Test that hypothesis
- Publish the results
- Be right
- Get famous
To be fair, most scientists don't really crave fame, but they believe that rational explanations exist to all phenomena, they seek the truth within their work and that of others, and they must subject new results and ideas to intense scrutiny before they can be published.
Applying the scientific method to the Nile - Observations
The seasonal flooding of the Nile River in Egypt was regarded as a miracle for thousands of years. Imagine living in the desert, and having a river swell to flood stage without rain ever falling! In fact, the observations were so difficult to reconcile with human experience that they posed a tremendous challenge to scientific thought. Interestingly, nobody ever hiked up the Nile River to see where it started. At least, nobody wrote down their observations or drew a map or communicated their findings to the general public, which is essentially the same thing. This situation persisted for thousands of years until just over 100 years ago, when Richard Burton and John Henning Speke applied brute force scientific method to the problem. They went and looked for the source of the Nile. We will learn about their adventures later in this lesson. The changing views on the origin of this river make a fascinating journey through time, and through the minds of men.
We know that Pennsylvania rivers carry extra water just after a rain storm. Applying this logic to the Nile, we find that there are two important features of the Nile that need to be explained:
- It floods at the same time every year
- There is little if any rain in Egypt
Hypothesizing the origin of the Nile River
To the ancient Egyptians (5,000 BC), the annual Nile flood was attributed to a god, not to natural processes. The Pharaoh embodied this deity and bore responsibility for the depth and duration of the flood.
In 600 BC, Thales of Miletos, the Father of Greek philosophy, discarded mythical explanations to focus on physical realities. He traveled to Egypt to observe the Nile and attributed the flood to a period of weak North-South winds. Herodotus later discredited this with his own observations of the winds.
"[I wanted to know] why the Nile behaves precisely as it does. I could get no information from the priests or anyone else. What I particularly wished to know was why the water begins to rise at the summer solstice, continues to do so for a hundred days and then falls again at the end of that period, so that it remains low throughout the winter until the summer solstice comes round again in the following year." Herodotus, The Histories 5th century BC
The Nile delta was for millennia essentially a part of Europe, as it was settled by first the Greeks and then the Romans. As indicated above, the origin of the Nile flooding was of great interest both philosophically and scientifically. All of the great minds of Greece and Rome focused their energy on the Nile at one time or another. As you can see, individual thinkers applied a great deal of logic and thought — the scientific method — to the origin of the Nile. In every case, their contribution to our understanding of the Nile is trivial compared to their other intellectual endeavors.
