Brian Greene, in his book "The Elegant Universe" on p. 280 (I'm looking at the original 1999 edition as far as I can tell), writes:

"In January 1993, Witten and the three of us released our papers simultaneously to the electronic Internet archive through which physics papers are immediately made available worldwide. The two papers described, from our widely different perspectives, the first examples of topology-changing transitions - the technical name for the space-tearing processes we had found. The long-standing question about whether the fabric of space can tear had been settled quantitatively by string theory."

The papers in question are hep-th/9301042 and hep-th/9301043, both submitted on January 12, 1993.

Brian Greene, in his book "The Elegant Universe" on p. 280 (I'm looking at the original 1999 edition as far as I can tell), writes:

"In January 1993, Witten and the three of us released our papers simultaneously to the electronic Internet archive through which physics papers are immediately made available worldwide. The two papers described, from our widely different perspectives, the first examples of topology-changing transitions - the technical name for the space-tearing processes we had found. The long-standing question about whether the fabric of space can tear had been settled quantitatively by string theory."

The papers in question are hep-th/9301042 (Witten, Phases of $N=2$ Theories In Two Dimensions) and hep-th/9301043 (Aspinwall–Greene–Morrison, Multiple Mirror Manifolds and Topology Change in String Theory), both submitted on January 12, 1993.