Boringly, it will be dissipated as a little tiny bit of heat energy, rather than anything exciting happening such as the spring exploding into a time warp or the acid multiplying and eating up the whole world and everything in it. As is the case with most questions you can think of where it isn't clear what happens to some energy that you've previously captured in something and then put that something through a process which will render it no longer having that energy.
cisamcgu said:
Potential energy is energy .. you cannot just ignore it
Jaded said:
The answer is that it is only potential energy, not real energy.
Therefore you can discount it.
No, potential energy is just as valid a type of energy as any other type of energy. It doesn't mean the potential
of energy, just like the 'assistant director' doesn't always mean assistant
to the director, they're still a director, just an assistant one. If you take a heavy object to the top of a high building, its potential energy doesn't only "become real energy" when you chuck it off, it's still GOT that energy. Potential energy IS REAL energy.
Also, possibly more boringly, it takes a lot more to create potential energy than it does to create the same amount of joules of heat energy - in other words, it would take an awful lot of compression of a very big spring to produce a significant temperature rise in a significant volume of acid if this was carried out. And even then some of the heat energy generated might be consumed by the chemical reaction so this would have to be taken into account if you were trying to predict the temperature rise.
