Sixty years ago Enrico Persico gave two seminars, one in Messina and one in Palermo, with the title “Le strane proprietà del plasma” which we freely translated as the title of the present article. Is what was unusual 60 years ago, in a sense, still unusual now? Possibly the “non reductionist approach” that the study of plasmas requires. Again, freely translating from the seminar notes [1] “ This field of physics is characterised by the fact that, even if the laws that describe the elementary microscopic forces are known, the different phenomena that take place in plasmas are so intertwined that predicting, or even just interpreting, the plasma macroscopic behaviour is often extremely difficult”. Where does this intertwining come from? And, is it universal? Often in multibody systems the presence of thermodynamic equilibrium puts to rest most of the details in the system behaviour that arise from the peculiarities of the interaction forces. But in plasmas even local thermodynamic equilibrium is generally not present: this is a fundamental property of electromagnetic interactions in dilute systems. And plasmas constitute most of the visible matter in the Universe.

六十年前，恩里科·佩尔西科举办了两场研讨会，一场在墨西拿，一场在巴勒莫，标题为“Le strane proprietà delplasma”，我们随意翻译为本文的标题。从某种意义上说，60年前不寻常的事情现在仍然不寻常吗？可能是等离子体研究所需的“非还原论方法”。再次，自由翻译研讨会笔记[1]“这个物理学领域的特点是，即使描述基本微观力的定律是已知的，等离子体中发生的不同现象是如此交织在一起，以至于预测，甚至只是解释，等离子体的宏观行为往往是极其困难的”。这种交织从何而来？而且，它是通用的吗？通常，在多体系统中，热力学平衡的存在会消除由相互作用力的特殊性引起的系统行为的大部分细节。但在等离子体中，甚至通常不存在局部热力学平衡：这是稀系统中电磁相互作用的基本属性。等离子体构成了宇宙中大部分可见物质。