Talk:Attractor Field/@comment-150.101.121.161-20151015142725/@comment-7888499-20151015171249

You're welcome. :) No worries, I'm not particularly versed in Time-Travel fiction either. I'm just a SG nut. But from what I can tell the rules presented in Steins;Gate are different in some significant ways from most time-travel fiction anyway.

The accidental creation of time machine PhoneWave in the Future Gadget Lab was part of the important events of July, 2010. However, the change from the Beta to the Alpha attractor field at the very beginning was the D-Mail Okabe sent about Kurisu's death getting caught by Echelon and noticed in the future by SERN. SERN then used the PhoneWave, etc. that they confiscated to speed up its own time machine research in the future which leads to the events of the Alpha attractor field, including Alpha Suzuha crashing into the Radio Building. That is why the sending of the D-Mail about Kurisu's death acted as the trigger followed by Suzuha crash-landing to shift the world from the Beta to the Alpha attractor fields at the start of the story. Because all of this is so strongly caught up in the Alpha AF's world line convergence it probably would be impossible due to convergence for Okabe to have destroyed the PhoneWave in Alpha AF. Instead he chooses a route with much more probability of success by "undoing" one by one all of the D-Mails that had been sent, to get the world to shift incrementally back through the various Alpha AF's world line divergences and into the Beta AF.

For most of these shifts this entailed sending another D-Mail that undid the effect of the previously sent one, such as Okabe undoing the D-Mail that told him to stop Suzuha from leaving, which led to the time machine breaking in a rain storm, by sending another D-Mail telling him to let her go after all. The very first D-Mail about Kurisu being murdered, however, was changed not by sending another D-Mail, but by hacking into SERN's database and deleting it before the D-Mail could be noticed by SERN in the future. This was enough to shift the world away from the guaranteed "SERN dystopia" future of the Alpha AF back into the "headed for WWIII due to an international arms race to build a time machine between Russia, the US, and SERN" future in the Beta AF.

Time leaping and D-Mails have a different reach which effects how much change can be achieved with them due to world line convergence. For example that D-Mail about Kurisu dying was received in the whole Alpha AF field. A large range of divergences in the Alpha AF also received the D-Mail that prevented Faris's father from dying in the plane crash. However, when you time leap you are restricted to only going back by a couple of days -or was it three? I can't remember. ^^;- and the fluctuation to the world line divergence caused by the arrival of your future memories in the past is less than ±0.000000%, so you are still very much close to the world line of the future you leapt from and your actions are caught in the same convergence more or less. The only way Okabe could have theoretically created the same effect as a D-Mail by time-leaping would be if he had been able to time leap from Aug. 13 to Aug. 9 -which is too far to time leap with their technology- and not stopped Suzuha from leaving; which Okabe did just as well by just sending another D-Mail about it.

Yes, I believe that "the idea of one world line being active and the rest inactive" is canon, but I might be understanding it a little differently from you...? I actually wrote quite a long blog post partially about that. I'm in the middle of revising it with some new information, etc. but if you would like to read it at its current version, it can be found here. -It's the same thing that I linked to the very end of in my previous comment.-

The reason why our main Active Okabe says that to the "native" Okabe is partially sentimental but also because that Okabe is, in a sense, going to go on the journey -even if he is an inactive Okabe in what will be inactive world lines-. The way in which Active Okabe saved Kurisu preserved the journey he went on. For further explanation of that concept, the blog post I linked to covers it as well as another conversation I had recently here.

I hope this helped. :)