Daniel S. Milo

He then showed that the birth of the myth was coupled with the invention of the division of time into periods of 100 years; the century was invented around 1600 and became standard around 1800.

"Milo won acclaim by his intriguing study Trahir le temps in which he deconstructed our periodization of history time by means of experimental models."

Betraying reality in order to reveal it is at the basis of the experimental method.

Milo wrote a manifesto, "Pour une histoire expérimentale ou La gaie science" (Toward an Experimental History or The Gay Science) that was translated into German (twice), English, and Russian.

Following Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), Milo enumerated several archetypal experimental methods: graft, ablation, injection, transfer, change of scale, and collage.

He gathered a group of historians willing to play with the past.

Daniel Shabetai Milo (דניאל שבתאי מילוא, born 21 August 1953 as Daniel Milwitzky) is an Israeli-French philosopher and writer.

Milo is a professor of natural philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

He is the author of nine books, eight published by Les Belles Lettres in Paris and one at Harvard University Press, and has written thirty-five articles and book chapters; his work was translated into nine languages.

He directed three short films and several theatrical productions.

The leitmotiv of his scientific and artistic work is excess.

His ambition is to revive natural philosophy, the precursor of modern science during the centuries between Aristotle and Darwin.

Daniel S. Milo was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1953.

His father, Yossef Milo (Milwitsky), was born in Berlin and his mother, Bruria Milo (née Weitzen), was from Poland.

He obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy, comparative literature, and film studies at the University of Tel Aviv, completing his master's thesis in 1980.

After moving to Paris in 1982, Milo wrote a Ph.D. dissertation in cultural studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and was subsequently elected professor at the same institution.

Milo's Ph.D. dissertation, "Survival in Culture," was his research into excess and his first encounter with Darwinism.

There are too candidates to the cultural pantheon.

The struggle for life in collective memory is Malthusian.

He treated posterity as the cultural equivalent of natural selection.

Milo was a pioneer in applying quantitative tools to the cultural canon.

He assessed the posthumous life of an artist or a work by counting its presence in textbooks, translations, museums, encyclopedias, theatrical repertoires, etc. He was the first to study translations and street names as historical and cultural markers.

Two of the chapters of the dissertation were published in the Lieux de mémoire (Sites of Memory) and one in the Annales HSS.

The next phase in Milo's research was questioning periodization, the division of the past into distinct parts, in Trahir le temps (histoire) [Betraying Time (History)].

This project began with a thought experiment: What if we began to reckon time, not from the crucifixion of Christ (1 AD) but from his Passion (33 AD)?

All dates would then be thrown off by 33 years, the first third of each century thus going to the century before.

This game of historical fiction allows us to problematize the arbitrary notion of "century."

Milo then questioned other divisions of the past, with recurrent emphasis on their artificiality; hence, the metaphor of "gerrymandering time."

The title of the book plays on the two meanings of the French verb "trahir," to betray and to reveal.

In order to study the past one needs to betray it, and the most traitorous tool is periodization because arbitrary periods suggest the existence of realities that do not truly exist.

Among these divisions, he studied the notion of generation and the invention of the split BC (before Christ)/AD (Anno Domini), which is a division that is totally irrelevant to practically all historical phenomena.

In a study on the so-called terrors of the Year 1000 he showed that this collective psychosis could not have existed because 99% of the medieval population ignored the date of the year in which they lived.

Alter Histoire provoked bitter controversy but ended reaching the status of a classic: "this was the most radical and also the most interesting plan for renovating history in France in the 1990s. What is more, the plan was carried out."

Most questions about human affairs are not testable because of the constraints on human subject research.

So Milo sought willing subjects in literature.

In the 1990s, he studied in Héros & Cobayes (Heroes & Guinea Pigs, 1997), fictional situations as laboratories and fictional personae as guinea pigs.

Milo read the story of the Garden of Eden as a laboratory in cognitive science.

God puts Adam in front of two trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.

Strangely, He forbids Adam from eating from the latter but says nothing about the former.

The results were published in Alter histoire: Essais d'histoire expérimentale (Alter History: Essays in Experimental History, 1991).