  We review briefly the thermodynamical interpretation of black hole physics
and discuss the problems and inconsistencies in this approach. We provide an
alternative interpretation of black holes as quantum objects and investigate
the statistical mechanics of a gas of such objects in the microcanonical
ensemble. We argue that the theory of black holes has the conformal properties
of duality and satisfaction of the statistical bootstrap condition. We show in
the context of mean field theory that the thermal vacuum is the false vacuum
for a black hole and define a microcanonical vacuum which leads to a number
density characteristic of pure states for the Hawking radiation.
