When Carl Sagan was writing "Contact" he attended a conference that was also attended by his friend Kip Thorne. Sagan knew that one of Thorne's pet peeves was science fiction that just hand-waved away the physics of FTL travel.
Sagan told Thorne he was writing a science fiction novel, needed FTL travel, and asked Thorne if he could suggest something that would be reasonable. Thorne agreed to look into it.
After the conference, Thorne spent a while working on it and came up with a wormhole approach and worked out the physics of it.
In addition to giving it to Sagan, Thorne also put it on the Ph 236 (General Relativity) final exam. He didn't tell the students on the exam that it might imply FTL travel. He just set up the conditions and had them work out the physics. Most of his students succeeded in that, but he was a little disappointed that none of them happened to notice that it implied FTL travel.
(I got the above from an unpublished book Thorne was working on in the early '80s. It was a collection of biographies of and interviews with physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, etc., written and conducted by Thorne. He had the draft chapters and the raw interview transcripts in a world readable directory on the physic's departments VAX, where they were widely read by the rest of us with accounts on that machine).
Sagan told Thorne he was writing a science fiction novel, needed FTL travel, and asked Thorne if he could suggest something that would be reasonable. Thorne agreed to look into it.
After the conference, Thorne spent a while working on it and came up with a wormhole approach and worked out the physics of it.
In addition to giving it to Sagan, Thorne also put it on the Ph 236 (General Relativity) final exam. He didn't tell the students on the exam that it might imply FTL travel. He just set up the conditions and had them work out the physics. Most of his students succeeded in that, but he was a little disappointed that none of them happened to notice that it implied FTL travel.
(I got the above from an unpublished book Thorne was working on in the early '80s. It was a collection of biographies of and interviews with physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, etc., written and conducted by Thorne. He had the draft chapters and the raw interview transcripts in a world readable directory on the physic's departments VAX, where they were widely read by the rest of us with accounts on that machine).