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Saying that it happened before the Big Bang is super misleading. Most readers would assume that the inflationary period is part of the Big Bang.

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The paper's authors are surely writing for an audience of physicists and not a general audience. As mentioned here[1], their audience will expect this usage. ScienceDaily may not have, though if they did, it would have been nice for them to highlight the distinction.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666140

Agreed. I wonder what the authors think “Big Bang” refers to if it occurred after inflation.

That's what I was going to ask.

But from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666140, cited by sls:

> They're using "Big Bang" to mean the hot, dense, rapidly expanding state that is the earliest state of the universe for which we have good evidence. In models with inflation, this state occurs at the end of inflation, when "reheating" transfers all the energy stored in the inflaton field to the Standard Model fields (quarks, leptons, and radiation).'

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