> In other words, if a tree’s branches were folded upward and squeezed together, the tree would look like one big trunk with the same thickness from top to bottom.
In forestry, they teach that as "pipe model". I am unable to track down how long that observation has been known in forestry, but I found this 1964 paper that attempts to build on the observation (already known in 1964) and build a theory.
It's kinda nice, how you can take a bunch of metal wires to make a tree trunk, and start separating them and folding them into branches, and separating and folding into smaller branches, and this can give pretty realistic looking trees.
> In other words, if a tree’s branches were folded upward and squeezed together, the tree would look like one big trunk with the same thickness from top to bottom.
Absolutely fascinating!