A revolution is not measured by what it destroys. It’s measured by what a community agrees to believe afterward.
“Revolution” usually calls to mind barricades, not paradigms. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions asks directly why a change in scientific knowledge should borrow the word from politics at all, and answers with a genuine parallel rather than a metaphor.
Kuhn argues both kinds of revolution start the same way: “a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the [community], that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created.” A political system loses legitimacy when it can no longer solve the problems it faces. A scientific paradigm loses its grip the same way, once its own anomalies outrun its ability to explain them.
The parallel goes further than the trigger. Kuhn argues that neither kind of revolution resolves by appeal to some standard outside the community involved, “there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.” A paradigm does not get replaced because a neutral referee declares it wrong. It gets replaced when enough of the people doing the work stop being able to work inside it. That is the specific sense in which a change in knowledge, not force, can be called a revolution at all.
Source: Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (1970), Chapter IX.