Implications of the Higgs boson, part III

Posted on November 5, 2012 by

LHC point 1 at CERN, where the ATLAS detector is.

Part I, Part II

So there’s this new particle around that’s thought to be the Standard Model Higgs boson. The next big news on this particle is coming very soon. Two weeks from now, on November 12th, a conference in Kyoto called Hadron Collider Physics (HCP) will begin. The LHC experiments have been in a frenzy trying to get new exciting results to show at this conference. The LHC has been doing extremely well: it has produced for its experiments in 2012 more than three times the amount of data it produced in 2011, and it will keep going until the end of the year.

The dataset to analyse is bigger than it was at the last big announcement on July 4th. This means more sensitivity to things yet unseen, and more precision to things already seen. The discovery announced on July 4th has left a number of open questions. The answer to these questions might very well be that there is new unsuspected physics just around the corner…

The Higgs boson as a gateway to new physics

The Higgs boson would be the final piece completing the Standard Model of particle physics. We have however, numerous reasons to think the Standard Model isn’t all there is to Nature. Most obvious is its complete lack of power to explain gravity, dark matter or dark energy. But also, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions such as why do the fundamental particles have the specific masses that they do, and why they are organized in three generations. At the LHC, we are on the lookout for hints of something beyond the Standard Model. This new particle we just found might be our quickest road to it.

In part I of this series of posts, I was a bit wrong in claiming that the new particle observed has no spin. I found out upon discussion with my colleagues that it is also possible that this new particle has spin 2. A spin 2 particle is a pretty weird beast, maybe even weirder than a spin 0 particle. There aren’t any spin 2 particles in the current roster of fundamental particles, except for maybe a very famous but hypothetical one: the graviton.

Remember that in part I, I said that the spin of  a fundamental particle has rather counter-intuitive implications on how that particle behaves. Spin 1/2 particles can’t pileup on top of each other in the same state while spin 1 particles can. Spin 2 particles can also carry interactions between spin 1/2 particles. Spin 0 particles permeate all of space and can generate rapid expansion of the Universe under special circumstances… Spin 2 particles can also carry interactions, and they are the only particles that can carry interactions that have no balancing act.

What do I mean by this? Think about the electromagnetic force. There are positive charges and negative charges, but mix the two charges together (in an atom for example) and you end up with something neutral. This is what I mean by balancing act. The strong force has color charges and the weak force has hypercharge and isospin and these two forces can also “cancel out” in their own weird ways.  Gravity is much simpler and much more annoying. You can never get rid of it by cancelling it away. Everything attracts everything else. It’s very counter-intuitive, but only a particle with a more complicated spin configuration like spin 2 can be responsible for such an apparently simpler force, that is if gravity even is carried by a fundamental particle.

We know that this new particle we saw in the LHC collisions can decay to a pair of photons. Photons are spin 1 particles, but they can’t have 0 spin. Since spin has to be conserved during decays, the fact that we end up with two photons implies that the original particle has either spin 0 (two photons of opposite spins come out) or spin 2 (two photons of the same spin come out).

Speaking of the decay to two photons, one thing that has been quite striking to me is how frequent it has been observed to be. If this particle really is the Higgs, it should not happen that often. We have seen more pairs of photons that we expected to see if the particle really is the Higgs boson. Does that throw the Higgs boson out the window? Not yet. It is a bit early to say that this anomaly is significant. It may just vanish when we become more sensitive by acquiring more data. Nevertheless, if the anomaly persists, it may be our very first clue to what physics are like beyond the Standard Model.

It turns out that another mode of decay of the new particle has been showing up too often. The decay to a pair of Z bosons has also been seen with an unexpectedly high frequency, but that anomaly is even less significant. More light will soon be shed on this at the HCP conference, even if no definitive statement is made yet.

What is also interesting about the decay to a pair of Z bosons is that it can yield some more information on the spin of the particle. I don’t think this is the kind of thing we can expect in the HCP results, but by closely inspecting the two Z bosons we can tell whether it is a spin 0 or a spin 2 particle. It’s just a very difficult measurement, and we might not even have enough data to do it yet.

Now, the Higgs boson of the Standard Model is also predicted to decay to taus and b quarks. These decay modes have yet to be seen, but they may be announced at HCP. There is also the possibility that the new particle does not decay by these modes. That would certainly be an indication that we are dealing with something else than the Higgs boson. Interestingly, a spin 2 particle would be forbidden to decay to taus, since taus are spin 1/2 particles (it just wouldn’t add up). The decays to taus and b quarks might also be weaker than expected (to compensate for the excesses in photons and Z’s?) but that would also be a deviation from the Standard Model expectations. For more on the spin of the new particle, I strongly recommend this article on Quantum Diaries. Actually, I recommend the whole blog :)

Getting into wild guesses, it is possible that what decays to photons is a different particle than what decays to Z bosons. An excess in the production of pairs of W bosons has also been seen, so maybe that’s another, different particle. Unfortunately, not all decays modes provides us with the same information. We can get more detailed spin information from W’s, Z’s and taus than we can from photons. We can get better mass measurements from Z’s and photons than for W’s and taus. It’s a tough game to make sure all these phenomena are tied to the same particle, but we can get reasonably certain once we have good accuracy on mass and spin measurements.

I haven’t talked at all about what the new physics might be if not for the Standard Model. There are lots of ideas out there, from extra dimensions to supersymmetry, from composite quark models to technicolor. Some of these ideas have already been driven to near-extinction by experimental results from the LHC and other experiments. I don’t feel the need to talk about them because at this point, we really don’t know. Lots of people out there have a favorite theory, and they will be eager to tell you what physics beyond the Standard Model may look like, but not me. I’m hoping for the unexpected. In some sense, it’s even more emotionally driven than the attachment to one particular theory, because then everything is possible. But in the end, experiments will have the final word, and the scientific community will listen.

So the Higgs boson of the Standard Model have a lot of very precise predictions about what it decays into, how frequently and what spin it should have. That makes room for unexpected findings, since all these predictions have to pan out. This is when science gets exciting, because verifying a prediction that’s never been checked before is when huge discoveries are made. I strongly sense I will have more entries to this series to write after HCP. Stay tuned!

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And one in french!

Posted on October 31, 2012 by

It’s been a while since I posted anything with some actual content. I am at a turning point in my analysis, as the ATLAS group with whom I work is making the transition to a new analysis strategy. Busy days!

These past weeks I also discovered fantastic singer/songwriter Louis-Jean Cormier. Take a peek at his album, le treizième étage. It’s fully available on his main page. It’s pretty rare that I prefer french singing to english singing. I think he does it so well that I got motivated to start writing songs in french again. Here is my first attempt. It’s called La tempête. The text may be a bit depressing, so it’s OK if you don’t understand it all :)


I got some more ideas for implications for the Higgs boson, so part III of the series should follow pretty soon.

————————————————

La Tempête

J’ai accepté la défaite, je me soumets face à la mort
J’ai renversé la tempête tout juste avant qu’elle frappe encore
Et je serai toujours bien vivant dans ta mémoire
Je serai toujours présent dans le récit de tes histoires

Face contre terre
J’entends le grondement de l’armée qui vient
Cloué au sol
Immobilisé par la peur de te perdre

Laisse
Laisse moi derrière, je resterai pour toi
Je perds
La notion du temps face au désavantage
Cesse
De t’attarder à mon sort au moins pour une fois
À la guerre
Une folie qui transforme la terreur en courage

J’ai accepté la défaite, je me soumets face à la mort
J’ai renversé la tempête tout juste avant qu’elle frappe encore
Et je serai toujours bien vivant dans ta mémoire
Je serai toujours présent dans le récit de tes histoires

À force de faire
Parler les idéaux que l’on retient
Prends ton envol
Il n’y a pas une seule seconde à perdre

Le moment passé, tu arrêteras
Tu seras en vie mais à quel prix?
Mon absence te dévoreras l’esprit
Mais le temps passera et moi aussi

Laisse
Laisse moi derrière, je resterai pour toi
Je perds
La notion du temps face au désavantage
Cesse
De t’attarder à mon sort au moins pour une fois
À la guerre
Une folie qui transforme la terreur en courage

J’ai accepté la défaite, je me soumets face à la mort
J’ai renversé la tempête tout juste avant qu’elle frappe encore
Et je serai toujours bien vivant dans ta mémoire
Je serai toujours présent dans le récit de tes histoires

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Who you are

Posted on October 17, 2012 by

Yes! It’s another song! After some major kicking-in-the-ass I finally managed to write some lyrics to this song I composed back in 2010. Back then it wasn’t fully acoustic, but already featured a lot of acoustic guitar. I layered more stuff than usual in this one, I kind of like recording songs I can’t possibly play live by myself :) Enjoy!

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Implications of the Higgs boson, part II

Posted on October 1, 2012 by

Massive blue marble, African version, NASA.

Part I

If you have been following the news about the Higgs boson, you may have heard the standard explanation to why discovering it is such a big deal: it is the provider of mass in the Universe. Too often, that explanation is left hanging there, and people are still wondering why this is such a big deal. It is also slightly misleading. So let’s try to get to the bottom of things.

The Higgs boson as the provider of mass in the Universe

It all begins with E=mc². The true meaning of that equation is that mass is just another form of energy. In fact, mass is the result of energy being bottled up. Bottled up energy is often called potential energy in the physics jargon, and potential energy can arise in a number of ways. Take a pendulum. You find a pendulum that is not moving at the moment. If you give it a small push, it starts oscillating. You bottled up the energy of that little push inside the motion of the pendulum. You could place a marble in the path of the pendulum, and as soon as the pendulum hits the marble, the pendulum would stop and the marble would roll away. You just un-bottled the energy in the pendulum. Potential energy is stored energy that can put things in motion once released.

This is also what happens in atoms. Atoms have a bunch of electrons trapped around a nucleus. If the nucleus were to suddenly vanish, the electrons would fly apart. You can see the electrons as little pendula oscillating around the nuclei: the electromagnetic force replaces the string, and the nuclei replaces the pivot. So there is some energy bottled up there. This is the realm of chemical energy. Chemical reactions capitalize on the energy bottled up in electrons trapped around nuclei. It’s that kind of energy that powers your cell-phone and it’s that kind of energy that can do this.

But that’s not the only place where energy is bottled up in an atom. In fact, there is only a tiny fraction of an atom’s energy in the electrons. Turns out the nuclei is also full of energy. The protons and the neutrons making the nucleus are tied together via the strong nuclear force. If we keep with our metaphor of the pendulum, the string is now that new exotic force. However, it becomes more difficult to define a pivot. I can you could say that the pivot for one proton in the nucleus is all other particles in the nucleus, if that makes any sense.

The energy bottled up in nuclei is responsible for that kind of explosion. It is also the instigator of everything that happens in and on the sun. Grasping how much energy the sun produces is as difficult as understanding how big a galaxy really is. The take-home message is, chemical energy is nothing compared to nuclear energy.

But we are not done yet. Turns out there is another level. The protons and the neutrons also have unimaginable amounts of energy bottled up, and that’s because they are made of quarks. The quarks are also like pendulums oscillating around each other, also held together by the same strong nuclear force. You may have guessed by now that anything that is made of parts and that is held together by something has bottled up energy. That is true of anything. By pulling the parts apart, you can release that bottled up energy. However, sometimes, the energy it takes to take these things apart is greater than the energy it would release.

Another observation you might have made to this point is that the smaller the objects, the more potential energy they contain. That is as long as they have parts. So what does E=mc² have to do with anything? That’s because that bottled up energy in small composite objects turns out to make for most of the mass of the things around you. Take a proton for example. It is made of three quarks. Sum the masses of these three quarks together (~10 MeV) and you get nowhere near the real mass of the proton (~1000 MeV). So what’s going on here?

It turns out the rest of the mass of the proton is the energy bottled up between the quarks. There is so much energy in there that this account for almost the entire mass of the atom. At this point, you may ask, what about the quarks? Are they made of smaller components too? Surprisingly, until last summer, we had no clue. And by no clue, I mean we had no data that pointed directly to an answer. Now we do have a clue.

There is a number of particles that we think are not made of parts at all. These are the ones we call fundamental and the quarks are among them. Other famous fundamental particles include the electrons and the neutrinos. So if these particles are not made of parts, how can they even have mass? Now we know that it’s all thanks to something very similar to the Higgs boson (if not exactly the Higgs boson).

Unfortunately, this is where it gets complicated. Our pendulum metaphor completely breaks down: it is utterly inadequate to explain how the Higgs boson gives mass to fundamental particles. So how do you get energy bottled up without a pendulum? It all boils down to the fact that the Higgs boson is a scalar field.

Mathematically speaking (and I swear this is the closest we are going to get to actual maths), a scalar field is something that is present throughout space. At each point in space, it takes on a particular value. Think of a room full of air. The air is everywhere in that room. If nothing happens inside that room, the air pressure is the same everywhere. The air pressure here is our example of a scalar field.

If you drop a penny inside the room, the penny will disturb the air pressure. When it falls, the air ahead of it will compress, and the air behind it will thin. When it touches the ground, it will send ripples of air pressure throughout the room, commonly known as sound. But notice how, at any single moment, you can describe the entire air pressure situation in that room with a single number at each point in space. If nothing happens, that number is the same everywhere. When the penny falls, that number rises ahead of the penny, and drops behind it, but stays more or less the same everywhere else. When the penny touches the ground, the numbers at each point in the room goes up and down as the sound waves go through them. We use a scalar field to describe air pressure.

The Higgs field is just like that. It has a single value at every point in space. That single value is in fact energy. Since the Higgs field interacts with fundamental particles, that value will change in the vicinity of fundamental particles. In fact, it will rise. There will be energy bottled up in the Higgs field around a fundamental particle caused by the mere presence of the particle. Also, how much energy is bottled up in the Higgs field will depend on the type of fundamental particle.

At this point, you may have many questions. I know I do. I can guarantee you that it will be very hard to find a question about the Higgs boson to which we have an answer. You may ask:

  • Why do the Higgs scalar field have different amounts of energy for different types of particles?
  • Fundamental particles are organized in generations, within which the only thing that changes is the mass. Does the Higgs explain that?
  • What about dark matter and dark energy? Does the Higgs explain the mass they contain as well? They are after all, most of the Universe’s content…
  • You talk about the Higgs boson, the Higgs field, the scalar field, it’s getting confusing!
  • Where does the energy found in the Higgs field come from?

At least, the last two questions have answers. But that is a topic for another post!

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Resurrecting Reminder

Posted on September 30, 2012 by

I’ve been very bad at writing lyrics recently, which is why I circulated a single new song this year. I have a number of acoustic songs for which I have figured out everything except the lyrics.

So I was fooling with the tuning of my guitar, and found a really weird one in which I could resurrect one of my old songs from 2008. So here it is. It’s called Reminder. It’s the longest song I ever wrote, and that’s one of the reason I eventually gave up on it until now. This acoustic version really brings a new life to it.

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Implications of the Higgs boson, part I

Posted on September 17, 2012 by

Cosmic microwave background from WMAP, NASA.

It feels like it’s been a while since I talked about some physics. I planned to do a quick list of the different implications of the Higgs boson, but then I got carried away by how fun the details actually are. I hope you reciprocate that feeling.

Here is a collection of thoughts on the Higgs boson. It has been on my mind a lot since July. After all, it is the object of my graduate student efforts. You may ask: Isn’t it already discovered? Why are you still spending time on it? I will answer: What if we never went back to space after Gagarin? There is no such thing as an endgame in the quest of science. If we don’t keep on digging, we may miss out on the deepest implications of the discovery. Possible implications like…

The Higgs as the driver of early Universe expansion

The particle we just discovered at CERN, even if it turns out to be something else than the Higgs, is still something rather special. It is the manifestation of a scalar field, something we never saw before in nature. Wait, what? What is a scalar field and how come nobody makes a big deal out of it? To that second question, I honestly don’t know. I guess only an experimentalist can truly be startled by the fact that we finally observed a fundamental scalar field in nature since theorists have been playing with scalar fields for decades in their models. But the thing is, we know something is amiss in our current understanding of particle physics, and it could have turned out that Nature does not allow scalar fields to exist. For most physicists, scalar fields have been among the first things they played with when learning quantum field theory, so it is pretty easy to forget that we did not even know if they existed.

So what is a scalar field? This is a bit difficult to explain because it requires an understanding of the most (or second most) counter-intuitive concept to come out of quantum mechanics. I name thee, spin! So let’s start from the beginning to make it easy.

We have conservation laws in physics. In fact, if there is one thing you really need to learn from physics, it is the absolute ruling of conservation laws in the Universe. We have conservation of energy, which is the most familiar. But we also have conservation of momentum, which is a little more subtle. Momentum can be seen as “movement energy”. Movement has a direction in space. So to specify the momentum of an object, you need to specify three things: how fast it’s moving, where it’s going, and how massive it is. If the object is twice as massive and going at the same speed, it will carry twice the momentum.

You may already know that everything wants to go in a straight line. In the Universe, going straight is the easy way. If you want to follow a curve, you need a force to help you. The most classic example is being in a car going down a curve. You feel like you are being pulled outwards, but that is just your body resisting going in a curve. Your body wants to go straight ahead, but the car which is turning is not letting you do that. Another classic example is the slingshot. You spin a projectile, but as soon as you release it, it flies away in a straight line. Well, you wish it went in a straight line, that would make it very easy to aim, but it curves back down to Earth because of gravity. Gravity also keep things from going in straight lines, that’s why every body travelling in the solar system is following various curves.

So everything following a curve is subject to a force. Notice that this is true of every object, even it you can’t readily identify the force that keeps it on a curve. If you look at an airplane propeller, what keeps its atoms from flying apart in straight lines away from the rotor is the force that makes it solid: electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is what glue atoms together in the form of various types of chemical bounds.

When things are spinning, we are talking about a special kind of momentum. We call it angular momentum, and it is also a conserved quantity. It is conserved just as tightly as linear momentum and energy. Although to be precise, you can exchange them: you can trade some angular momentum for some linear momentum by suddenly eliminating the force that makes things go round, as in the slingshot example. But if the force that makes the object spin isn’t going away, angular momentum will be conserved.

The big question is: what happens when it comes down to objects so simple they are not held together by any force? If the object has not components, there can be no force holding these components together. Can this object still spin? Can it still have angular momentum? It turns out it can, but in a really, really weird way.

That object without components I am talking about is a fundamental particle such as an electron, a photon, a Z boson, a Higgs boson… What is extremely weird about the angular momentum of these single particles is that it comes in discrete bunches. Wait, what? What do you mean? Speed of rotation is discrete? My brain hurts… Mine too. That special kind of discrete angular momentum, we call it spin. Electrons for example, can only have two possible spin values. Whaaat? You mean, spinning and not spinning? No, even weirder. It can only spin clockwise and counter-clockwise. It cannot not be spinning.

The fact that an electron always have spin makes it a special kind of particle. In the trade, we call these particles fermions. The fact that they always spin makes them behave in funny ways. You can’t pile up fermions in the same state (same position, same momentum, same spin), no matter how hard you try. They will always find a way to distinguish themselves. This is the reason why electrons make up special structures around atoms. You can put two electrons on the same orbit around an atom, but only if they have different spins. If there already is two electrons in that orbit, you can’t put a third, since that third electron wouldn’t have any choice but to spin the same way as one that is already there. If you try to add a third electron to this atom, it will fall on a different orbit, and so on.

Why do electrons behave this way? What does that behavior have to do with their weird “impossible to not spin” property? I have to admit this is very tough for me to answer without pulling out some maths. I have no intuitive understanding of it, only a mathematical one. If you have the patience to go down that road, I recommend reading about Fermi-Dirac statistics. There may be good non-mathematical explanations out there. Let me know if you find one!

There are other types of particles. Some particles are allowed to have no spin. These particles are called bosons. They do not behave like fermions at all: you can pile up as many as you want in the same state. But there are two kinds of bosons: those that can spin, even if they don’t have to, and those that simply can’t spin. The bosons that simply cannot spin are the scalar bosons. This is what the Higgs boson is. This is what the particle that we found recently at CERN is. And this makes it a special particle indeed. You may already have guessed that spin properties give weird super-powers to fundamental particles, and scalar bosons are no exception.

We have this big problem right now in our understanding of the Universe. We are having trouble explaining why the Universe looks the same in all directions. If you have seen images of the cosmological background radiation, which represents the state of the Universe at a very early stage, don’t let it fool you. The fluctuations you see are exaggerated so that you can see them at all, because they are variations of less than 0.01%… So the universe is pretty uniform, but that is not what we would expect from the mind-bending scenario that is the big-bang model.

The big-bang alone predicts much larger fluctuations in the distribution of matter in the Universe than what we currently observe. So we need either a new theory entirely, or an additional mechanism that would smooth things out. What if you just stretch things out until the fluctuations are just too large to be seen? This is what inflation is all about. It is a fairly well-tested idea in the sense that it survived some very precise cosmological data so far. A big-bang model with inflation has something to say about the remaining fluctuations seen in the cosmic background radiation, and it’s all in accordance. Although, in order for inflation to happen, you need a new fundamental field in nature, a scalar field…

So maybe the Higgs boson is the thing that drove inflation, but even if it isn’t, we now know that scalar fields are not just figments of our imagination. In any case, the discovery at CERN changed how I perceive the idea of inflation. It made it more plausible than it was before.

**EDIT: I was told by an esteemed colleague that there are indeed other scalar fields in nature than the Higgs boson. You can indeed take existing fundamental particles and bind them together in a way that will cancel the overall spin of the system. You can have composite scalar fields. A good example are the pairs of electrons formed in superconductors, usually called Cooper pairs. However, a fundamental particle that is a scalar field has remained unseen until this year. A composite scalar field would not have been able to drive inflation because at the time of inflation (10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang), the Universe was screeching hot. Bound systems simply could not form: they would be immediately destroyed by colliding with other particles existing at that stage. This is why a fundamental scalar field is necessary for inflation in the early Universe.

Part II

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La soirée électorale

Posted on September 5, 2012 by

Par Radio-Canada.

Sorry to my English friends that I never got to translating that one. If you are interested, let me know and I’ll make an extra effort.

Il s’est passé énormément de choses hier soir. Certaines positives, d’autres tout simplement horribles. On a l’impression de se réveiller à un monde nouveau ce matin. Je ne prétend pas comprendre toutes les implications des événements de la soirée électorale, mais ces événements résonnent dans ma tête et je dois partager quelques opinions.

Résultat des votes

  • Parti Québécois: 54 sièges (43% des sièges), 32% des voix;
  • Parti Libéral: 50 sièges (40% des sièges), 31% des voix;
  • Coalition Avenir Québec: 19 sièges (15% des sièges), 27% des voix;
  • Québec Solidaire: 2 sièges (1.6% des sièges), 6% des voix.

Malgré le soulagement immense que j’ai à voir que la CAQ n’est pas l’opposition officielle (comme ça ils ne peuvent pas déclencher des élections parce qu’ils ne sont pas d’accord avec les résultats), je trouve absolument exagéré la différence entre la proportion des voix et la proportion des sièges à l’assemblée nationale. Il me semble que ce soit le temps qu’on passe par dessus le système électoral britannique “first past the post” et qu’on passe à quelque chose de plus sensé où on peut mettre les partis en ordre de préférence.

Première Ministre

Nous avons enfin une femme comme Première Ministre du Québec. C’est une victoire progressiste indéniable. Personnellement, j’aurais aimé que la première Première Ministre du Québec soit quelqu’un d’autre que Pauline Marois. Elle ne m’a jamais inspiré confiance, et je trouve son obsession avec la souveraineté désolante. Comment prendre au sérieux une politicienne qui dépense près d’un million de dollars pour une toilette à son bureau… J’ai néanmoins espoir que son gouvernement ne sera pas un désastre.

Terrorisme

N’y allons pas de mains moites avec les mots. Un attentat terroriste est exactement ce qui a eu lieu à l’assemblée péquiste. Une personne décédée, deux autres blessés et traumatisés. Une phrase lancée en l’air par le coupable: “Les anglais se réveillent”. Une province indignée, horrifiée qui essaie d’interpréter cet événement de toute sortes de façons. Certains continue la campagne de défamation contre notre jeunesse et blâme les étudiants. D’autres blâment les Québécois anglais. Tout ceci est ridicule. C’est exactement le but du terrorisme: semer la discorde et rendre les gens paranoïaques. Depuis quand accordons-nous la moindre crédibilité à ce genre de détraqué? Il n’y a rien à interpréter. Il a agit seul, il n’est pas le porte-parole de personne. On se réveille avec la sordide réalisation qu’au Québec aussi, on a des fous prêts à tirer dans une foule. Ce n’est pas seulement qu’en Norvège, au États-Unis, au Moyen-Orient ou ailleurs dans le monde.

Léo Bureau-Blouin

Ça me fascine hautement que Léo se soit fait élire. J’imagine que l’élection fédérale de Mai 2011 a établi un précédent comme quoi qu’on n’a pas à se restreindre à des candidats au-delà de 50 ans. Félicitations Léo. Donne à ma génération une raison d’être fier. C’est de ça qu’on a besoin plus que n’importe quoi d’autre en politique présentement.

Souveraineté

Stephen Harper félicite Pauline Marois pour sa victoire. Il fait voir qu’il veut coopérer avec le Québec peu importe si le parti au pouvoir est souverainiste ou non. La souveraineté du Québec est considérée comme une menace au plan fédéral. Qu’on le veuille ou non, la possibilité d’un référendum met le Québec dans un rapport de force avec Ottawa. Stephen Harper n’est pas chaud du tout à l’idée de la souveraineté et il le laisse savoir. Son geste de bonne foi envers le Parti Québécois est très stratégique. J’espère juste qu’il est aussi honnête.

Ceci étant dit, le Parti Québécois ne devrait pas interpréter sa victoire comme étant un signe que les Québécois veulent un référendum. Beaucoup de Québécois ont voté pour le Parti Québécois tout simplement parce que ses politiques sociales et économiques sont relativement sensées. Mais en fait, c’est beaucoup plus parce que les gens qui sont progressistes sur le plan économique et social n’avait pas d’autre choix. Ça aurait été différent si on avait eu un NPD provincial. Ce que ça nous prendrait à ce moment, c’est que les firmes de sondages se tournent sur la question de la souveraineté. Je fais la prédiction que ces sondages révèleront que les Québécois ne sont pas plus chaud que d’habitude à l’idée d’un Québec souverain (**Edition: En effet. Cet article très intéressant fait le parallèle entre le Québec, l’Écosse et la Catalogne). Peut-être ces sondages convaincraient-ils le Parti Québécois d’abandonner un coûteux référendum en cette période de dépression économique…

Taux de participation

74,61%, le plus élevé depuis 1998. Ça c’est une bonne nouvelle. Cependant, il reste dérangeant que plus que 25% de gens ne soient pas allés voter. Je dois malheureusement me compter parmi ceux-ci, mais ce n’est pas par faute d’essayer. J’ai fait la demande de vote par correspondence deux semaines avant l’élection, et j’attend toujours mon bulletin de vote… Je m’apprête à déposer une plainte au DGE.

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