The wormhole goes to television
After 1988 the word "wormhole" turned up wherever a series needed a door between stars; how much of that was the paper and how much was the word already being in the air is the question this page asks.
Kind: lineage · Span: 1988–2011 · Last reviewed: 2026-09-13
The line
Before Morris and Thorne 1988 the wormhole was a physicist's word for something nothing could cross. Wheeler coined it in 1957 for the Schwarzschild bridge, and Fuller and Wheeler showed in 1962 that the bridge pinches shut before a signal gets through. Television used the word anyway: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) throws the Enterprise into a "wormhole" caused by a warp imbalance, and Isaac Asimov, consulted on the film, objected to the word and proposed "temporal tunnel". Bujold's Vorkosigan books were routing ships through wormholes from 1986. So the word did not need the paper. What the paper added was the adjective. Morris and Thorne made a wormhole that stays open, and within eighteen months Star Trek: The Next Generation had "The Price" (13 November 1989), an episode built around a stable wormhole, the first of its kind. Four years after that Deep Space Nine opened on one: in "Emissary" (3 January 1993) Dax announces "the first stable wormhole known to exist", and the series parks its station at the mouth for seven years. There is no dossier for the Bajoran wormhole in this catalogue, and the absence is recorded below.
The Stargate film of 1994 is the odd one out: its gate is a "doorway between our worlds" and the transcript never says wormhole. The word arrives with the series. In "Children of the Gods" (1997) Carter says the energy needed to "create a stable wormhole" is astronomical and points at the fluctuations in the event horizon, and from then on the franchise talks in the vocabulary of the 1988 paper: stable wormhole, event horizon, exotic energy at the gate. Farscape (1999) starts with an astronaut telling his cell wall "I must have come here through a wormhole" and, by its fourth season, has a character called Einstein explaining that a wormhole joins times as well as places, which is the Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever result with the names removed. Nobody on any of these shows cites the paper, and no writer interview found for this page says they read it.
The one link on this page with a name and a date attached is the last. Sean Carroll consulted on Thor (2011) and wrote on his blog on 16 May 2011 that one phrase in the film was "directly attributable to my input": producer Kevin Feige needed the Bifrost to carry people across space fast, would not have "wormhole" because it sounded "too Nineties", and Carroll offered "Einstein-Rosen bridge" as meaning the same thing. That is the Einstein–Rosen bridge of 1935 named on screen for its sound, twenty-three years after the paper that made wormholes traversable had made the word so common a producer was tired of it. The descent of the wormhole from Sagan through Thorne to Contact and Interstellar is sagan-thorne-contact-interstellar; the folded sheet the shows use to explain the thing is the-paper-fold.
The links
| From | To | Year | Evidence | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wheeler, "wormhole" | The word in sf | 1957 | SFE, "Wormholes": Wheeler coined the term in 1957 for a hypothetical short cut through spacetime | [MED] S3 |
| The word "wormhole" | Star Trek: The Motion Picture | 1979 | Wikipedia, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", technical consulting: Asimov thought "wormhole" the wrong word and proposed "temporal tunnel". Predates the paper by nine years | [MED] S3 |
| Morris and Thorne 1988 | Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Price" | 1989 | Aired 13 November 1989, written by Hannah Louise Shearer; a stable wormhole, "the first of its kind known to exist". Timing only; no statement of influence found | [LOW] S3 |
| "The Price" (1989) | Deep Space Nine, "Emissary" | 1993 | Aired 3 January 1993, story by Berman and Piller, teleplay by Piller; Dax: "the first stable wormhole known to exist" (transcript). Piller on the premise: an opportunity to look at the Federation "by standing still", the wormhole supplying the frontier | [MED] S3 |
| Morris and Thorne 1988 | Stargate (1994 film) | 1994 | None. Two transcripts of the film contain no use of "wormhole" in dialogue; West calls the gate a "doorway between our worlds". The dossier's claim that the film attaches the word is not supported | [LOW] S3 |
| Devlin's story idea | Stargate (1994) | 1994 | Devlin's account of a "Lawrence of Arabia" chase story joined to Emmerich's buried-ship idea by a conceptual artist's transporter device (GateWorld 2024, JoBlo 2025). One press paraphrase puts the chase "through a wormhole"; the word may be the journalist's | [LOW] S4 |
| Morris and Thorne vocabulary | Stargate SG-1, "Children of the Gods" | 1997 | Carter: the energy to "create a stable wormhole" is astronomical; "the fluctuation in the event horizon" (transcript). Vocabulary match only | [MED] S3 |
| The word "wormhole" | Farscape, "Premiere" | 1999 | Crichton: "I must have come here through a wormhole" (transcript). The pilot treats it as an accident, not a physics object | [HIGH] S1 |
| Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever 1988 | Farscape, "Unrealized Reality" (4.11) | 2002 | Einstein's account that wormholes join times as well as places, per the fiction dossier. No writer statement found; resemblance only | [LOW] S3 |
| Sean Carroll, consultant | Thor (2011), "Einstein-Rosen bridge" on screen | 2011 | Carroll, "Thor Points", preposterousuniverse.com, 16 May 2011 (syndicated the same day at Discover): the phrase is "directly attributable to my input"; the Feige exchange is given as a conversation that "went something like this" | [HIGH] S3 |
What is not sourced
- Any writer reading the paper. Not one of the shows above is tied to Morris and Thorne by a credit, an interview or a script note. "The Price" arrived eighteen months after the paper with the paper's central adjective, which is suggestive and nothing more. Settling it would take the TNG or DS9 writers' accounts (the Deep Space Nine Companion, Erdmann and Block 2000, was not consulted) or a science-consultant credit naming a source.
- Stargate and the word. The fiction dossier gives the 1994 film the word "wormhole" at high confidence. Two transcripts say otherwise. Watching the film would settle it; until then the word belongs to the 1997 series.
- Deep Space Nine has no dossier. The Bajoran wormhole is the most-used stable wormhole in television, artificial by the pilot's own account ("whoever made the Orbs also created this wormhole"), and it is not in the catalogue. That gap is a finding of this page, dated 2026-09-13.
- Diffusion against influence. The plain reading is that Morris and Thorne changed what a wormhole was allowed to do in physics, and television picked up the change through the general culture, popular science and one another, not from the paper. Carroll's account is the exception that shows what documented influence looks like: a named person, a dated post, a sentence on screen.
- Carroll's exchange is a reconstruction. He presents the Feige dialogue as going "something like this". The attribution of the phrase is his own, first-hand and unchallenged; the wording of the conversation is not verbatim.
Sources
- S1 Morris, M. S. and Thorne, K. S., Am. J. Phys. 56, 395–412 (1988). doi:10.1119/1.15620. §I.C and abstract read.
- S1 Farscape, "Premiere" (1.01, 1999), Jim Henson Company; transcript at farscapecontinues.com, read for the wormhole lines.
- S1 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Emissary" (1993), story by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, teleplay by Piller; transcript at springfieldspringfield.co.uk, read for the wormhole lines.
- S1 Stargate SG-1, "Children of the Gods" (1997); transcript at stargate-sg1-solutions.com, read for Carter's lines.
- S1 Stargate (1994), directed by Roland Emmerich; transcripts at stargate-sg1-solutions.com and scripts.com, searched for "wormhole" with no hit.
- S1 Thor (2011), directed by Kenneth Branagh, Marvel Studios; the Einstein-Rosen line is verified in the fiction dossier.
- S3 Carroll, S., "Thor Points", preposterousuniverse.com, 16 May 2011; the same text at discovermagazine.com under Carroll's byline and date. Read in full.
- S3 Science Fiction Encyclopedia, "Wormholes", for Wheeler's 1957 coinage and the list of sf uses including Bujold from 1986 and Deep Space Nine.
- S3 Wikipedia, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (Asimov and "wormhole"), "The Price (Star Trek: The Next Generation)" (airdate, writer, the stable wormhole), "Emissary (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)" (airdate, writers), "Wormholes in fiction".
- S4 Patton, J. M., "How Was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Made", CBR, 12 February 2024, for the Piller "standing still" quotation.
- S4 GateWorld, "Stargate at 30: How a Science Fiction Dynasty Came to Be" (October 2024), and Hamman, C., "Stargate (1994): What Happened to This Sci-Fi Action Film?", JoBlo (updated April 2025), for Devlin's and Emmerich's origin accounts.