The Organization of Complex Systems

Abstract

The Nobel Laureate Hideki Yukawa earned his prize by observing that the neutron and the proton required a strong, localized force field to hold them together in the atomic nucleus, and that this field should have the properties of a particle — the particle we now know as the pi-meson or pion. The organizers of this series of lectures, having described it as “an experiment in communication between physicists and biologists”, evidently concluded that those two kinds of particles — physicists and biologists — also required a binding force to hold them in stable communication. Borrowing Yukawa’s idea, they invited me — a behavioral scientist by training — to serve as the pion for the series.

[Pattee (ed.), Hierarchy Theory, New York: G. Braziller, 1973, pp. 3–27].