The whole reverse engineering statement is nonsense.
Thought experiment:
Drop a laptop from thousand feet on the ground.
Take the pieces and put it in your timemachine and send the former laptop to some early genius, let us take Leonardo da Vinci.
Does anybody really believe Leonardo could reverse engineer from that heap of laptop trash an electronic device like a TI 30 calculator?

How do you reverse engineer things (which physics background are unknown) that needs technology you don't posess neither have the knowledge nor the necessary support to build?