They Might Be Giants performed at last years' TED conference.

Courtesy Flickr/jurvetson A sold-out confab of celebrities, industry titans and alpha geeks will converge on Monterey, California, for a four-day, invitation-only celebration of big ideas this week.

Now in its 24th year, TED begins on Wednesday and runs through Saturday. It is an elite event where leaders in technology, entertainment and design gather to cross-pollinate ideas and gain inspiration from presentations on the latest developments in sciences and the arts. Political leaders take the stage too: Former President Bill Clinton received the annual TED prize at last year's conference; former Vice President Al Gore has also been a speaker.

The conference attracts a wide range of people, from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to musician Peter Gabriel and filmmaker J.J. Abrams.

Those who can't afford the $6,000 price tag for TED's excellent adventure have an alternate for the first time this year with a parallel conference called BIL, which will be held near the conference center housing TED. BIL is an open-ended gathering designed to complement TED, and begins just after the closing beach party that ends TED on Saturday.

BIL does not charge attendees but conference goers must create their own roster of speakers – anyone who shows up at BIL can give a presentation there. The list of scheduled speakers includes some current and past TED presenters.

About 1,100 people are expected to attend TED. This year's conference theme is "Big Questions," and speakers will be looking at core issues like who we are, where we came from and what our place is in the universe.

The 50-plus speakers will include theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi, who garnered headlines last year after publishing his Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything online, which proposes a unified theory of the universe's structure that rivals the widely supported string theory.

Experimental physicist Brian Cox will be discussing the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN lab outside Geneva, Switzerland, which scientists hope will provide information to support string theory or other theories of the universe after the Collider's turned on for the first time this summer.

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo will look at why people become evil by discussing his famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which students playing "prison guards" in a simulation quickly became abusive toward their "prisoners." Zimbardo will discuss how the abuses perpetrated by the students in his study parallel what guards at the Abu Ghraib prison did to inmates in Iraq.

Other speakers include John Knoll, creator of Photoshop and visual effects supervisor for Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and Mission Impossible, author Amy Tan and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi.

Former Vice President Al Gore is also slated to give a presentation, though organizers haven't revealed the subject of his talk yet. Two years ago Gore presented his now-famous slide show on global warming to the influential TED crowd.

The conference has recently adopted a more socially-conscious focus designed to get the wealthy power brokers thinking about projects that can improve the world. That was the impetus for the TED prize, an annual award launched in 2005 to recognize individuals whose work has had and will have a powerful and positive impact on society. It provides each recipient with $100,000 and the chance to ask for help from the TED community in achieving one grand wish to change the world.

The three winners of this year's TED prize will announce their wishes at the conference on Thursday. The winners include Cambridge University theoretical physicist Neil Turok, author and founder of the 826 Valencia literacy project Dave Eggers and former nun and comparative-religions scholar Karen Armstrong.

TED, which has long been an elite gathering, opened up to a much wider audience after it began posting – video of its talks on its website in 2006. According to conference organizers, 200 talks from past TED gatherings have been posted so far and have been viewed around 30 million times.

Wired.com will publish stories from the conference all week and will also be covering it on our Epicenter blog.

TED 2008 Coverage Q&A With Paleontologist Peter Ward: Hydrogen Sulfide May Kill Us, Bring Us Back to Life Informal Conference Borrows TED’s Big Ideas, Not Its Pretense Q&A With Brian Cox: Rock Star-Turned-Physicist Trades Keyboard for Atom Smasher Q&A With British scholar Susan Blackmore: Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes Q&A With A. Garrett Lisi: Surfer-Physicist's Unified Theory Leads to Fame, Backlash Q&A With Philip Zimbardo: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib More TED News on Wired's Epicenter Blog Digerati en Route to TED

TED: Jeff Han, A Year Later

Epicenter: Bill Clinton Out-Charisma'd at the TED Prizes