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LK Advani, a senior leader in the rival BJP party, called Singh India's "weakest prime minister".

In the past few weeks, euphoria over LK-99, a different material that scientists in South Korea say is a room-temperature superconductor, swept over social media, although much of that excitement has since calmed after other scientists were unable to confirm the superconductivity observations and came up with plausible alternative explanations.

Independent confirmation of the researchers’ claims would’ve meant that their buzzy new material—a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen dubbed “LK-99”—could conduct electricity frictionlessly, without any loss of current, in a wider array of environmental conditions than any other known substance.

Of course, the boom-and-bust cycle of LK-99 is a classic demonstration of science in action.

But in the fading afterglow of LK-99’s social-media-fueled rise and fall, it’s probably worth examining one dimension of what might’ve driven all that excitement in the first place.