Black Holes as P-Branes

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.