A black hole of given mass, angular momentum, and charge can have a large number of different unobservable internal configurations which reflect the possible different initial configurations of the matter which collapsed to produce the hole. The logarithm of this number can be regarded as the entropy of the black hole and is a measure of the amount of information about the initial state which was lost in the formation of the black hole. If one makes the hypothesis that the entropy is finite, one can deduce that the black holes must emit thermal radiation at some nonzero temperature. Conversely, the recently derived quantum-mechanical result that black holes do emit thermal radiation at temperature κ ℏ 2 π k c, where κ is the surface gravity, enables one to prove that the entropy is finite and is equal to c 3 A 4 G ℏ, where A is the surface area of the event horizon or boundary of the black hole. Because black holes have negative specific heat, they cannot be in stable thermal equilibrium except when the additional energy available is less than 1/4 the mass of the black hole. This means that the standard statistical-mechanical canonical ensemble cannot be applied when gravitational interactions are important. Black holes behave in a completely random and time-symmetric way and are indistinguishable, for an external observer, from white holes. The irreversibility that appears in the classical limit is merely a statistical effect.