Forms of Energy Part 2 - why don't we already have a name for this stuff?

Krishna asked me yesterday what physicists call "phase energy" and I gave him our standard answer: In thermodynamics, they call it "internal energy," which I guess is OK, but not terribly descriptive or helpful, since this phrase could also be applied to a lot of other stuff. The closest term we have is "latent heat," but this is actually the change in phase energy, not the phase energy itself. Maybe we should call it "latent energy."

Then he asked me another question that really got me thinking: Why don't physicists have a name for phase energy? How have we managed to get by for all these centuries without naming it?

My guess is that it's because we normally talk about phase changes in the context of thermodynamics, where thinking about forms of energy is just not part of the model.

I recently read a pair of papers about the relationship of forms of energy and thermodynamics:

Kaper, W.H. and M.J. Goedhart (2002), "'Forms of energy', an intermediary language on the road to thermodynamics? Part I". International Journal of Research in Science Education 24 (1), 81-95.
Kaper, W.H. and M.J. Goedhart (2002), "'Forms of energy', an intermediary language on the road to thermodynamics? Part II". International Journal of Research in Science Education 24 (2), 119-137.

Apparently in the 80's the British Department of Science and Education decided that school kids shouldn't learn about forms of energy at all because this language is technically incorrect in all sorts of ways (e.g. you can't really separate spring energy from thermal energy once the spring is deformed), and it is subsumed by thermodynamics, which is more technically correct. These papers address the question of whether it might be OK to introduce forms of energy as an intermediary language on the road to thermodynamics in the same way as we introduce classical mechanics as a lead-up to quantum mechanics even though it's technically not right.

Never mind that teaching school kids thermodynamics instead of forms of energy sounds completely insane in the same way that it would be insane to teach them quantum field theory instead of Newtonian mechanics. Aside from that, it seems to me that thermodynamics is just inadequate to describe things like balls rolling down hills and compressing springs (which is why physicists don't use it for this), because it doesn't make enough distinctions. Thermodynamics doesn't use forms of energy, not because we don't need them anymore once we've learned thermodynamics, because it only deals with a narrow range of situations where making all these distinctions isn't as relevant.

But maybe these distinctions actually are relevant. Thermodynamics textbooks always talk about refrigerators and Carnot cycles, but I've never met a physicist who felt that they actually understood how a refrigerator works. That is, until we started working on it. I felt that I understood a refrigerator for the first time when I saw Hunter's FFPERPS/FFPER talk in which he broke it down in terms of forms of energy, including phase energy. And I know I'm not the only one who had this reaction. Introducing phase energy provides a new window into what's actually going on in a refrigerator, even for those of us with PhDs in physics. It separates things that have been blurred together in our minds. It clarifies mechanism. It satisfies us in a way that our previous treatment can't.

So I want to make the argument that there is pedagogical value to introducing forms of energy into areas that we have previously treated only with thermodynamics, not just because inventing new terms is what scientists do and students should be able to do it too, but because these new terms actually help us to make distinctions that we were not able to make before.

Should this be the thesis of our phase energy PERC paper?