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The problem there is one of energy scales. Whenever a system decays, it goes from a state of higher energy to a state of lower energy. In order for something to be stable, there must be no decays that can possibly happen. That is, the system must already be at the lowest energy possible. For example, the neutron decays to a proton, because a proton+electron system has less energy than a neutron. Bind the neutron with a proton, forming deuterium, and suddenly it is stable. The neutron is unstable by only a free MeV, and so the binding to a proton can stabilize it. All matter is made of up and down quarks. The next lightest quark, the strange quark, is about 100 MeV. It order to stabilize it, there would need to be some binding effect that would bind a strange quark 100 MeV more strongly than an up or down quark. That would be the only way to make the strange quark system be the most stable. And here we run into the problem that, of the four fundamental forces, none of strong enough and specific enough to the strange quark to do so. The strong nuclear force, which stabilizes the neutron, is the strongest, and only provides that few MeV of binding, not the 100 or so that would be necessary. |