Fluctuation Studies at the Subnuclear Level of Matter: Evidence for Stability, Stationarity and Scaling

It is pointed out that the concepts and methods introduced by Bachelier and by Mandelbrot to Finance and Economics can be used to examine the fluctuations observed in high-energy hadron production processes. Theoretical arguments and experimental evidences are presented which show that the relative variations of hadron-numbers between successive rapidity intervals are non-Gaussian stable random variables, which exhibit stationarity and scaling. The implications of the obtained results are discussed.