Water can conduct electricity, and some solids can conduct. Why can't ice? Are ice molecules too packed together to let valence shell electrons bounce across each other to create electrical charge? Does ice stop conducting completely at absolute zero?
[Physics] Why isn’t ice a good electrical conductor
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Interesting, but I'm don't think you are asking the right questions in the context of law.
The point is that electrons and electricity are completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of "tangible" and "electronic" "goods". You will obtain a good answer only if you forget about electricity, which just happens to be a convenient physical carrier of information, and focus on the objects that might or might not be goods like a chair or a pen. A proper question would be this: "Is a newspaper article a good, like a chair or a pen?". Specifying whether the newspaper article is written on paper or "on electrons" or on something else is besides the point because the concept of "newspaper article" is entirely independent of the material it is written on.
To put it more pointedly: if you have to know the metaphysical nature of electricity to make a law about newspapers, you're definitely doing it wrong. ;-)
Keeping in mind that your questions and their answers are completely useless in the context of law, I can now proceed to answer them.
I don't know of any good analogy to electricity that captures it properly. It is like gravitation in that distant bodies attract each other, except that in electricity, bodies can also repel each other. Furthermore, the gravitational pull of, say, a chair is so small that we don't think of a chair as attracting us gravitationally. This is also why the water analogy doesn't work so well: water does not attract other water from afar. The "cause" for attraction/repulsion is the electrical charge.
The carriers of charge, like electrons or ions (= atoms with electrons missing) do have a mass. You can think of them as tiny, charged balls flying around through space (keep in mind that a copper wire consist of mostly empty space, too). On the other hand, electrical current does not have a mass, just like a water current does not have a mass, it simply doesn't make sense. (Both imply a mass current, however.) Likewise, electricity is a general term and does not have a mass, just like "law" and "liberty" don't have a mass.
The mass of a copper wire is the sum of the masses of its constituents, some of which are electrons. However, the number electrons exiting a copper wire is usually the same as the number of electrons entering the copper wire, so its mass does not change. In any case, the mass of electrons is way too small to make more than a negligible contribution to the total mass of the wire anyway.Again, "electricity" is a general term. The link you mentioned refers to electric current, which is the same as flow of charge. Basically, the link says that electrons are not the only tiny balls that carry a charge. This is indeed the case. It's just that in the common case of metals, electrical current is usually carried by electrons.
This question is not well-posed. Again, electricity is a very general term and encompasses things like electric field, electric current, electric charge etc. For instance, light is part of electricity as well, because it's an electromagnetic wave.
These are all good questions! Based on your description I assume you haven't had an introduction to solid state physics yet? Let's take your image of an electron that "jumps"
from atom to atom. In my understanding I wouln't describe it that way, to me it's a wavefunction of the electron that is almost independent from the valence electrons and you
can use the free electron gas approximation. Why is this band independent? See the following picture for an intuitive understanding how the atomic potentials define the possible energy levels within a periodic arrangement of atoms:
I think most of your questions will be easier to answer if you make yourself familiar with basic concepts and approximations people use to describe electrons in a solid first. Sure, a lot of things can be understood if we consider electrons to be little spheres that scatter from bigger spheres (ions), but you said you want to understand on the atomic level -> it's good to see the electron as a wave and see how this wave behaves in a lattice with certain boundary conditions.
First, I would read about a crystal. Atoms are arranged in a periodic lattice (assume a nice crystal for a first simple picture) and you can make assumptions based on this periodicity. You can define a unit cell and the Brillouin zone. You will see that the energy levels will sometimes split up in different bands and based on the filling of these bands you end up wih a metal, insulator etc. Electrons are fermions, can two electrons be in the same state? This defines the Fermi velocity.
This filling of the available energy levels describes the Fermi surface, a very useful tool to describe other more advanced concepts. Then you will see what happens if you change the arrangements of the atoms or why in different spatial directions electrons can move due to the bonding of different atomic orbitals.
This could be a good start ; ) -> http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
There are other introductions out there, most of them describe the basics really well.
Best Answer
Conduction in water is mostly ionic - for pure water you have a very small fraction of ionized molecules (about 2 parts in 10$^{-7}$), so conductivity for pure water is poor. Add a little electrolyte (for example NaCl) and conduction improves. But in an ice crystal, the molecules / ions cannot move, so the main conduction mechanism is disabled. In that case you rely on occasional conduction band electrons - but there aren't many of those around. The band gap is about 7.8 eV source which means that the number of electrons excited into the conduction band at 0C will be extremely low - the fraction given by the Boltzmann factor $e^{-E/kT}=e^{-322}$
Contamination and impurities can bring the band gap down significantly - but pure ice is a good insulator.