Title History of ``Church's theses'' and a manifesto on converting physics into a rigorous algorithmic discipline Author Warren D. Smith NECI Princeton NJ Abstract Church's thesis claims that any ``reasonable computer'' may be simulated by a Turing machine. The ``strong'' thesis says that the simulation may be performed with only polynomial slowdown. This document is both a history of ``Church's thesis'' -- and particularly of the notion that it is a statement about {\em physics} -- and an opinionated philosophical statement. Keywords Church's thesis, rigorous physics, polynomial time, effective continuous mathematics, computable real numbers, philosophy of science