 That possible stability against decay is the ""strange matter hypothesis"" proposed separately by Arnold Bodmer and Edward Witten.According to this hypothesis, when a large enough number of quarks are concentrated together, the lowest energy state is one which has roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, namely a strangelet.This stability would occur because of the Pauli exclusion principle; having three types of quarks, rather than two as in normal nuclear matter, allows more quarks to be placed in lower energy levels.