Michael S. Morris and Kip S. Thorne, “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity”, American Journal of Physics 56, no. 5 (1988), 395-412. The paper that moved traversable wormholes from curiosity to a standard problem in general relativity. It began when Carl Sagan asked Thorne to check the faster-than-light travel in the manuscript of Contact; Thorne and his student Morris worked backwards from the desired geometry to the material it would demand, defined the throat condition, and coined Exotic Matter. Every later wormhole and warp proposal, the Alcubierre Warp Drive included, is measured against it, and the Eric W. Davis and Metric Engineering literature cites it as the founding result.
PURSUE Release 06 record DOW-UAP-D139, Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy (2010), one of the DIRDs, credits the idea to Morris and Thorne in 1985, derives a stargate with a flat-faced throat through which a traveller would feel no tidal forces, gives a gross upper limit of minus 0.71 Jupiter masses for a 1 m throat, and says one still does not know how to construct one.
Connections
Exotic Matter · Alcubierre Warp Drive · Metric Engineering · Eric W. Davis · John Archibald Wheeler · DIRDs · Negative Mass Propulsion