Wirt Atmar writes:
> While Kip Thorne's wormholes were only meant to be a literary device in the
> novel, they did two things. The first was to spawn some truly serious
> theoretical work on whether or not they could be true (the jury's still out),
> and the second was to instantly make them part of the science fiction
> vocabulary, used everywhere nowadays as if they were as much a proven fact as
> the Roswell aliens.

Thorne's discovered a new theoretical form of wormhole, but he didn't invent the
idea, concept, or introduce it to science fiction.

The term "wormhole" dates back to 1957, coined by John Wheeler, who later coined the
term "black hole."  The concept dates back to a 1935 paper by Einstein and Rosen.
The term was used in the 1979 film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", several years
before Contact.  I presume it was used in print before that.

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