would that not be considered time travel? — unintelligiblekai

Yes that is correct form of "time" traveling, it's just hollywood concept for people to imagine it

Yes, had same idea few years ago it is entirely possible we do similar thing in computers when we do a "save" or "checkpoint" the only thing is even if knew all variables needed for a specific state of a universe, how do we push them to atoms? I like to call it state traveling much more fitting and theoretically speaking once we invent a machine to capture and push state through whole wide universe we would be able to calculate past based on it to its correct form then universe would become huge game where we change variables to state we need, sounds fun :)