Alpha And Beta World Lines In Stein's Gate

Willpower decides which course you travel in your life.

In the world of quantum physics, endless theories exists which try to define how our universe actually works. Some are the followers who play safe and base their theories upon pre-existing ones made by famous scientists to not get disrespected in the science community thereby taking away the innovation when making theories , while there are other scientists who the popular media like to call "Mad Scientists" who make extreme assumptions and consider them as the foundation for their theories. These assumptions made by them are so wild and ridiculous that they are never taken seriously by well established scientists. One of the most ridiculous theories made in the anime "Stein's Gate" has the concept of quantum physics which deals with the 4 dimensions of space-time. This theory in short can be named as "Alpha and Beta World Lines".

The title of the anime Stein's Gate is derieved from the name of Austrian philosopher and esotericistRudolf Steiner who was famous for his book called "The Philosophy Of Freedom". To summarize the whole book in a few words, it basically is a book which deals with the theory that whether humans are completely free or not. After his book was published , the book started to gain a cult status and the author became a legend in the philosophical community.

The anime has a main character Rintaro Okabe who is a self proclaimed "Mad Scientist" who believes that an organisation called SERN has been developing technology which can make time travelling possible. The organisation however faced severe problems while conducting experimetns on both non-living and living objects due to the sheer amount of information the objects in the physical world. He later invents a gadget using microwave technology and manipulating signal information which can allow him to transfer his present memories to his past self by using the singularity of a mini-Hadron Collider as the medium to gain access to the 4th dimension thereby making the whole process a lot easier to deal with.

World Lines is a concept in Quantum physics which deals with an object which traces it's path in the 4 dimensional space-time. The minute our universe was born, time started to exist. In classical physics, all things in the universe have a "destiny" which in scientific terms , it can be stated as having a definite path in the space- time trajectory. If destiny does exist, then the concept of freedom and willingness is meaningless. But the author stated that this definite path can be averted and one can carve his own path only if the person creates an event so large in the cosmic scale, it can surpass and break all the world lines.

There are various world lines which are both dependent and independent of each other. The impact of an event casues the world lines to create various other paths but are very similar to the parent world line. The person cannot jump to another world line unless his event causes a huge impact on the space- time barrier. Here the world line which the person needs to go to get true freedom is called the "Alpha World Line" and the one which he/she is stuck in is called the "Beta World Line".

This measure of impact from an event in the space-time in this anime is known as divergence number or the probability factor of all the events possible in the Universe and is measured in decimals. Normally if this divergence number is less than 1 then the person is in the "Beta World Line" but if the person surpasses the barrier of 1, he truly becomes free of all bounds and probabilities and reaches the "Alpha World Line" meaning whatever he wishes it's outcome will be imminent.