What franklin said.
When there is a radically new way of seeing things (based on evidence, tested, novel observations, etc), a paradigm shift takes place when the new generation replaces the older.
That's true on t.v., in real academic life, no.
That's true only in certain areas of certain fields and more often than not in the hard sciences (But even there, change takes a lot of time for the reasons I will outline), although we're starting to see some slips there as things like understanding DNA and heredity leads to some uncomfortable ideas that societal architects would rightly prefer to avoid.
However, if something goes strongly against social norms, and especially peer group-think dynamics, an idea can and will be squashed, manipulated, or rejected in total and anyone who touches it will be a pariah.
Think Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve," in no way meant to be racist and yet chapter 13 saw him vilified and pilloried as a KKK Dracula. Not over the work he had done, but over societies' and the social sciences insecurities.
This happens all the time, in every field, in all parts of human endeavors for logic. Why? Because reputation, financials, personal connections, and fear of upsetting orthodoxy of powerful men is a constant.
If a scientists develops a theory, do you really think a lot of them invite magnanimous criticism? That's nice on a t.v. show, and in the hard sciences there are a few who are so generous, but in general you're starting a war with a fickle and fearsome personality - with a high reputation, with support of an institution and it's colleagues, and with connections to journals, book publishers, and sympathetic media, all while enjoying he has tunure... do you want tenure? Do you want respect? Do you want your peers to admire you? Do you want the "important" people to agree with you?
Then do what the nice men who spent their careers researching the ideas say...