However, condensed states with a larger number of quarks might not suffer from this instability. 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.