Well, at one time, this meant that you should find ways, preferably subtle, ironic ways, of puncturing the suburbians. Lately, though, this is just a phrase uttered by those who want to be seen as smart. After all, three of the four words are SAT words.

It's from a book called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", by Thomas Kuhn which postulated that such revolutions did not only change the content of science, or even what could be called science, but also what questions were even worth asking. A scientific revolution was a paradigm shift. To understand the implications of this, it's helpful to study some of the history of what we now call science through the ages.

Though such study, one learns nearly without exception, any person who caused a (scientific, at least) paradigm shift was a lot smarter than you.