The statistical distributions of certain giant pulse (GP) properties appear to be well described by power laws. This suggests that the emission mechanism that produces giant pulses is a scale-invariant one. In turn this may indicate that the source of the GPs is in a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). For a recent discussion of SOC see Sornette et al. (1995).

Prior to this conference, the only pulsars reported to exhibit GPs were the Crab pulsar, PSR B0531+21 (Lundgren et al. 1995), and the millisecond pulsar PSR B1937+21 (Cognard et al. 1996). However, at the conference it was reported that giant micropulses had recently been observed from PSR J0437–4715 (Ables and McConnell, this volume). In all cases the statistical distributions of observed GP heights and/or fluxes are found to be well described by simple power laws. The arguments in this note apply to all these pulsars.