How Much Do We Really Know About Wood?

This critical review examines how much is currently known about wood from molecular chemistry to whole-board behavior. Particular attention is given to the distinction between bulk chemical composition and native molecular architecture; practical versus theoretical measurability; wood–water interactions; the limits of the conventional orthotropic representation; multiscale homogenization; and the gap between material-class knowledge and specimen-specific prediction. The review argues that major future bottlenecks in predictive wood science are increasingly associated with measurement feasibility, native-state preservation, parameter identifiability, cross-scale closure, and reconstruction of spatially heterogeneous internal fields rather than with numerical solution methods alone.