Talk:List of Known World Lines/@comment-11465111-20150705030504/@comment-7888499-20150705123143

I know what you mean. I personally have a tendency to sometimes mix up the alpha and beta attractor fields, because Okabe started his journey in the beta AF, so I tend to think of that AF as coming first and want to title it "alpha" instead. However, from the perspective of the plot narrative it makes since that 0.000000α is what it is and the the SG world line is a random number in the beta AF.

I recently quoted most of what the VN and the VN's official guide book have to say about this in a -unfortunately rather rambling- blog post, when I was trying to answer someone else's question, if you'd like to read what the actual sources have to say.

I think the main points for explaining this are: …I went into quite a bit of these things in that blog post if what I just wrote doesn't make sense yet.
 * 0.000000α is the world line that Alpha Suzuha always first jumped from.
 * She explains that the number is "a subjective, relative measurement, not an absolute". The Okabe from that world line -who is not the main story's Okabe- designated that world line 0.000000α, when he created the divergence meter at the very start of the time loop, since that was where he was and no form of measuring world lines had been created before.
 * It also makes sense that the SG world line is a number like 1.048596% and not 0.000000, because just because Okabe reached a world line where there is no time travel in the future, the SG world line is such a strange, unstable world line that it is unable to exist without Okabe having time traveled to reach it.
 * Now that he is in the SG world line from what we have been shown in the VN and spin-off material so far, he should have no way of knowing that it is actually 1.048596%. After all, I think that he didn't know the exact number of 1.130205β when he was there, because he never saw a divergence meter there and he was only told by Suzuha that he needed to go -0.086109% further. So, if Okabe were to make another divergence meter in the SG line for whatever reason, he might set it to zero, but yet again that's just an arbitrary number, the fact that time travel occurred is not erased from the SG world line's past.
 * Story-wise 0.000000α is interesting itself because it is an example of a world line that the main story's Okabe never activated effecting other world lines. Similar to how 1.129848β Suzuha effects 1.130205β to lead to the SG line.