Here Chaucer guides two young people of the future (well, really their avatars) through the basics of specral analysis and how the idea of "quanta" entered into the discussion.

In the introduction, Barad says "Physics can't be bootstraped into giving a full account of the social world.  I would be wrong to simply assume that people are the analogues of atoms and that societies are mere epiphenomena that can be explained in terms of collective behavior of massive ensembles of individual entities (like little atoms each), or that sociology is reducible to biology, which is reducible to chemistry, which is reducible to physics" (24). While her maneuver here is to carefully couch her own argumentative strategy as not attempting to equate the microcosm with the macrocosm (which would indeed be irresponsible if applied universally), it seems to me that Barad rules out the possibility of thinking of larger entities as particles by being (humanistically!) determined to see them as inherently more complex and thus guaranteed to act differently.  Some recent work on the physics of mosh pits comes to mind, wherein researchers find that the movement of human being is large crowds actually can be modeled like gas particles.  

Chapter Seven Hangout on Quantum Entanglements