Short-Lived Does Not Mean Insignificant: Time, Admissibility, and Structural Legitimacy in the Paton System

Duration is routinely misused as a proxy for significance. Within the Paton System, this is structurally incorrect. Systems are not granted legitimacy through persistence in time, but through admissibility under constraint. Short-lived events and long-lived structures pass the same Tier-2 → Tier-3 admissibility gate and therefore carry equal structural legitimacy. What differs is not meaning, but visibility at the level of observation. This work formalises duration as an observational artifact rather than a structural property, reframing transient events as fully participating elements within system continuation. Companion (Plain-English version): Short-Lived Does Not Mean Insignificant: Plain-English Companion (included in the same Zenodo record)