Hi,

Having a discussion with a self-proclaimed metallurgy expert who is claiming that electrons in electricity don't move at all, they just transfer "charge" and "spin".

Electrons have properties like mass, charge and spin. They're moving all the time (as they're in orbits around host atoms). Current is due to the non-random motion of electrons. That is, an Ampere of current is defined as the net motion of 1 Coulomb of charge per second across some boundary. It's about 6.24e18 electrons/s. (See [link|http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Current.html|this page] at Wolfram for the definition of current and links to other terms.)

Spin is important in other aspects of solid-state physics, but not in electrical current.

My understanding is that the electrons hop from atom to atom, utilizing the free energy states.

Yes. Electrons can only be in allowed energy states. One of the rules of quantum mechanics.

Metals make good conductors because they have a lot of free states, and the electrons are free to move easily.

Yes, but more precisely: Metals are good conductors of electricity because there are lots of available energy states, AND because the energy states are in a range that room-temerature electrons can easily reach. This differs from semiconductors like silicon in that there are a lot of available energy states in silicon, but there's an "energy gap" that prevents most of the electrons in the silicon crystal from being able to be in those energy states - the electron's don't have enough energy to be there. In silicon the energy gap is about 1.1 eV, while in metals the energy gap is very small or zero. It's this energy gap that makes it possible to control the conductivity of semiconductors (by "doping") and is what makes things like p-n junction diodes, npn transistors, etc., possible.

That doesn't mean an electron starts in the generator plant and moves all the way to my house, but there is a hopping from atom to atom going on.

Yup.

HTH.

Cheers,
Scott.