The information below is intended to provide introductory material for elementary students and further material for high school students. Please keep in mind that not all demonstrations are presented at each show, and each topic may not be covered. For a variety of reasons, some materials do not behave according to the properties discussed below. These exceptions are very important, but are too complicated to be discussed here. The temperature of an object is the measure of the speed of the object's particles.
All objects consist of many, many particles which are in constant motion.
The measure of the average speed of these particles is called the temperature of the object. A very high temperature, for example, simply means that the average speed of the object's particles is very high. There are three states of matter. The state an object is in depends solely on the temperature of the object. When a material is in its gaseous state, it has a relatively high temperature.