There are fundamental forces dictating the flow of time and the force of gravity and not only are we constantly searching for ways to stress these forces but in some cases we're trying to prove they actually exist at all.

For example, we know gravity waves exist only as a relatively recent discovery and there are many current researchers trying their best to manipulate them in some meaningful way. If they fail then they will have proven what is NOT possible (under specific conditions) which will in itself be a great discovery.

What you might be referring to is Quantum Mechanics breakthroughs such as quantumn system time reversal. These sort of things don't apply to the atomic scale or larger, just resetting the state of a subatomic system to a previous position, sort of like a windup toy.