Scientists, like poets, address questions about life, death, land, sea, space, time, love, and lust. Both may concern themselves with anything and everything in the universe. There is more science out there these days, and there are more popular and well-written books, conjuring with dazzling new ideas and more poets responding to both. For a poet, there are new images and themes to play with. Actually, science doesn't do such a bad job of explaining either vision or the emotions, it just isn't very good at explaining the exquisiteness with which we experience them.
Some poems are responses to the world as supplied by science.
Jo Shapcott's 'The Mad Cow Talks Back' is possible in that form because somebody first described a spongiform encephalopathy, and Peter Porter's Cold War poem 'Your Attention Please' is delivered, so to speak, by intercontinental ballistic missile capability, as first brought to you by Wernher von Braun. An idea that isn't being had any more. How odd that a moment so tiny that it can only be measured with a decimal point and then forty-two noughts before you get to an integer, should produce an idea as big as that. But perhaps there are some things that science and poetry do not want from each other.