Congratulations to the winners of the Cheney Essay Prize and the College Essay Prize

The Cheney Prize for essays in Arts and Social Sciences and the College Prize for essays in Sciences and Mathematics were judged by Arran Davis, Georgina Gregory, and Tom Sinclair.

The judges recommended that the Cheney Prize be awarded to Sam Foxell (History and Economics, 2022), for his essay, How can the history of land access inform the Right to Roam campaign?

The judges said, ‘…this essay offers a pleasing combination of personal reflection and historical contextualisation of campaigns for open access to land in England. It combines an engagingly poetic tone with serious historical writing, remaining readable and suggestive throughout as it provides thought-provoking historical contextualisation and critique of ideas about property and right that have come to seem immutable.'

Sam’s inspiration came ‘…from the convergence of two areas of interest: hiking, climbing, rambling, and basically anything to do with the great outdoors, and studying economic and class history. It has always angered me that large swathes of the English countryside are hidden from us behind fences, walls and scary looking signs reading “Trespassers will be prosecuted”. I wanted to know why landowners retain the right to exclude us from 92% of the countryside and why, despite an ecological crisis that demands a greater attention and connection to the land beneath our feet, legislation up to this point has been insufficient to institute a right to open access. Inspired by the Right to Roam campaign which is attempting to highlight inequality of land access in England, I was keen to place the movement in context in order to highlight the historical right and the modern need for access to our land.’

The judges recommended that the College Prize be awarded to Dylan Ng (Mathematics, 2022) for his essay, The Theory of Everything: where does everything even begin?

The judges said, ‘…this essay introduces an exciting topic – the search for a ‘theory of everything’ in physics – and is written in an engaging style as it takes the reader on a tour through physical theories, illustrative experiments, and theoretical problems. It is impressively well-informed and handles the exposition of difficult and technical ideas skillfully as it sets the scene of contemporary scientific investigation.’

Congratulations to Dylan, who told us about the inspiration for his essay:

'...I'd done a lot of reading on quantum over the summer. I hadn't studied it rigorously yet (that was last term), but of course, one of the major problems with quantum is unifying it with relativity. The main issue comes from relativity being deterministic, versus quantum being probabilistic. The more I looked into the issue, the more I found interesting approaches to it from various physicists like Stephen Hawking, and it really became a sort of rabbit hole that I had a lot of fun exploring!'

Many congratulations to both Dylan and Sam on their prize-winning essays.