[rm999]

There's a lot of confusion in this thread about "before the big bang". I was also confused and did some googling and found this explanation from a professor of theoretical physics. It seems that it's actually pretty normal to refer to the big bang as happening after the initial inflationary epoch, but others refer to it as the moment before this.

>Do not allow yourself to be confused: The Hot Big Bang almost certainly did not begin at the earliest moments of the universe. Some people refer to the Hot Big Bang as “The Big Bang”. Others refer to the Big Bang as including earlier times as well. This issue of terminology is discussed at the end of this article on Inflation [https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-...].

The article is talking about the "hot big bang", so it's using terminology that is accepted by other theoretical physicists.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-...

[AuthorizedCust]

Wouldn’t this be the result of some theoretical physicists moving the goalposts?

It sounds like they feel the commonly accepted understanding of the Big Bang is overbroad. Fine. Find new words to describe the subsets of the event. Redefining the word is just causing confusion.

[turndown]

Most of the stuff I have read on this presupposes that some kind of phase transition(think of the early universe being in a 'boiling' phase and then condensating) occurred that caused the field which drove inflation(with the force carrier called the inflaton) to decay and release all the energy in the field(that is, the inflatons decayed). This decay process is what we conceive of as 'the big bang', as in the start of the energy dense Universe we see a glimpse of in the CMB.

You are right that the goalposts have been moved. When analysis of the CMB began, it was noticed that it was far too uniform in distribution and temperature for what was previously thought to be possible. It was at this point that an inflationary period was tacked on before 'the big bang' because that was the only way to get the kind of 'big bang' we seem to have had.