So some questions:
1. Did they ever explain what exactly vigors are?
With ADAM it was stem cell slugs, so are vigors just tech stolen from another universe or did the Luteces' just invent it, later to be manufactured by Fink?
2. Did anyone else besides me pick up that Elizabeth was Dewitt's daughter REALLY EARLY in the game? Referring specifically to the scene where one of Comstock's female undercover commandos calls Elizabeth "Annabelle" (after the kid's arcade and before the train station ambush).
That was when I put it together that Comstock must have been an older Dewitt with player Dewitt being brought into a parallel universe (this theory made up because when Dewitt dies he's back in his office just before he heads off to Columbia, basically when he dies he resets then SOMEONE brings him back to where he was in the alternate timeline).
3. Why/How does Elizabeth have powers? Is it because the Luteces' messed with her physiology as an experiment or is it like the wiki says that having a part of her body cut off in a different universe allowed her to have an intuitive understanding of time-space which allows her to manipulate the Lutece fields...???
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also here's a better timeline
http://i.imgur.com/MaHNjLo.jpg
That's an absolutely excellent timeline I think and fits everything that we see in very well. This and EatChildren's timeline (and perhaps the ending timeline if you believe the paradox eliminates the universe entirely to form yellow one to merely highlight which events are paradoxical) work very well at showing what the Lutece's perceive (this one) and what Booker perceives (EatChildren's). Together they seem to give a very conclusive version of events that occur within the game.
EDIT: 1. Fink is watching some 'biologist' through a tear in another universe. The technology can't be stolen from Rapture because of how the Plasmids work. If it was they would first need to get the sea slugs. they would need something to harvest ADAM, they would need EVE etc. and splicing would lead to people seeing ghosts/others' memories and lead to mental degradation/addiction. So it seems extremely improbable that he's observing Rapture. The most likely scenario is that he's looking into another universe entirely where somebody else developed similar, easily produced technology and stole it from them. This is actually, in some way, something I don't like about the game. While a lot of details went into the plot, the setting isn't as 'thought out' (or merely explained) as much as Rapture. While we know how things came to be made, we don't know the workings of it. For example, in Rapture we learned how they got electricity, the workings of the Plasmids/EVE/ADAM, how they got oxygen in the sky, how the people lived, sources of entertainment, how the Big Daddies were made, and then each audio tape fed into the main plot and also the city while simultaneously building up that character. In Columbia, we get a lot of broad information about the city but most of the Voxophones are related to the main plot but don't tie in as much, instead they branch out and develop the characters, they don't seem as interwoven (of course the Luteces' Voxophones, Lady Comstock's, Comstock's and, to a much smaller extent, Daisy's do this but overall to me they just don't feel as tightly woven while covering as much details as Rapture's do).
2. Can't say I did personally but others here have mentioned that they figured it out. I suspected that Elizabeth would be Annabelle at the same point as you did (although I had no idea who Annabelle would be) butI figured out that Comstock was Booker (although I had no idea what led to them coexisting in the same universe or any of the specific mechanics behind it) in the Hall of Heroes with the repeated references to Wounded Knee and I didn't think they would pull a double twist so disregarded Elizabeth being Annabelle and thus Booker's daughter. There's quite a significant deviation in who figured out what at which points, if at any point before the end. There's quite a bit of foreshadowing throughout the game and the opening really puts you in a skeptical mind frame (which was a good idea since after Bioshock I imagine a significant number of players were going in looking out for any sort of repeating dialogue or potential twists) so it ultimately would depend on the player I imagine.
3. This actually has an easy explanation yet it is in a Voxophone on Monument Island and thus is very easy for the player to miss:
"What makes the girl different? I suspect it has less to do with what she is and more to do with what she's not.
A small part of her remains from where she came. It would seem the universe does not like its peas with its porridge."
i still cant fathom any timeline where liz kills all bookers, it also goes against the post credits scene.
Ok, so, at the end Elizabeth becomes practically omnipotent. She says she murders Booker before he makes a choice, and every Booker that survives Wounded Knee goes to the baptism. Lots of Elizabeths appear to represent Elizabeth drowning every Booker before he makes a choice (before he makes a choice has lots of emphasis placed upon it). This creates this paradox (the one in the post I'm quoting but I'll post it here so you don't need to flick between posts):
A look at this loop in what Booker sees is this (EatChildren's timeline with Zkylon's green edit):
As we can see, journeying to the baptism at the end causes the timeline to loop around. As was suggested, if you print it out and join the two ends together. Basically, it makes no logical sense for Booker's daughter to murder Booker before her conception, for this to happen there has to be a loop, and there has to be a paradox. A destruction resolution to a paradox is where, to prevent the paradox to occur. the universe has to remove everything that could lead to a paradox, so all of the timelines that will lead to the paradox cannot happen. In practical terms, when you put a microphone beside a speaker and talk into the microphone, the noise doesn't continually get louder and louder an infinite times, there is feedback and the feedback ends up destroying the speaker. Similarly, the feedback created by the paradox ends up destroying the universe. As Eatchildren stated, it's like a mini Big Bang in the universe.
Basically Elizabeth saw that Booker became Comstock. To prevent this happening she murdered every single Booker that existed in every universe that survived Wounded Knee and went to the baptism (which must always happen because it's a constant). This creates a looping paradox because it means (in very basic terms) that Booker was killed by his daughter before his daughter's conception. This leads to a destruction resolution whereby every probability that leads to this paradox is removed, because logically, a paradox cannot occur. Basically, originally, at the baptism there is two choices. Elizabeth makes it so that one of these choices cannot happen because otherwise it will lead to a paradox in every single universe that Booker survived Wounded Knee. As a result, they change the variable at the baptism (Booker can accept or reject it) to a constant (Booker must reject it because otherwise it leads to a paradox).
