What happened before, Big Bang or inflation? I always thought that the cosmic inflation happened after the big bang (10-36 sec) and lasted for a very tiny fraction of time).
Now, I recently came across a couple of articles (links below) claiming that Big Bang happened after the inflation stopped and when the reheating phase started.
I'm a bit confused as I always imagined the Big Bang as &quot;when everything started&quot;, so how can something be happened before that?

Ethan Siegel (2019) &quot;What Came First: Inflation Or The Big Bang&quot;
Gabriele Veneziano (2017) &quot;A Quantum Universe Before the Big Bang(s)?&quot;
The big bang (a singularity 13.8 billion years ago that was the beginning of time) didn't happen at all. Inflationary cosmology consists of:

ΛCDM (aka &quot;big bang&quot;) cosmology starting at a cosmological time of some small fraction of a second, preceded by

an inflationary epoch lasting for an unknown amount of time (but at least 50-60 e-folds), preceded by

there may be no way to know, because inflation erases any hints of what came before.


Times quoted as &quot;after the big bang&quot; are ΛCDM model times and don't count from the true beginning of time. There's a common misconception that if inflation ended $10^{-32}$ seconds &quot;after the big bang&quot;, that it must have lasted for no longer than $10^{-32}$ seconds. In reality, it has to last longer than that in order to accomplish its goal of producing smooth starting conditions for the ΛCDM epoch, and in most (all?) specific models it lasts for far longer than the minimum time. There are eternal inflation models in which it lasts forever.
We don't know how old the universe is. We only know that the current era of (non-inflationary) expansion started about 13.8 billion years ago.