I was misled

I should have done my research. It seems the anecdote about Wolfgang Pauli was incorrectly remembered. The physicist in question was actually Paul Dirac.

Dirac discovers purling
Another time, Dirac was watching Anya Kapitza knitting while he was talking physics with Peter Kapitza. A couple of hours after he left, Dirac rushed back, very excited. "You know, Anya," he said, "watching the way you were making this sweater I got interested in the topological aspect of the problem. I found that there is another way of doing it and that there are only two possible ways. One is the one you were using; another is like that. . . . " And he demonstrated the other way, using his long fingers. His newly discovered "other way," Anya informed him, is well known to women and is none other than "purling."

I guess that means I'll have to rewrite that limerick. In the meantime:

I tangled my Wolfgang-Paulology
in my yarn based on knitting's mythology.
Now it seems apropos
to admit that I owe
both Wolfgang and Paul an apology.

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