The book is based on the author's PhD thesis, which deals with the concept of time in quantum gravity and its relevance for the physics of the early Universe. It presents a consistent and complete new relational formulation of quantum gravity (more specifically, of quantum mechanics models with diffeomorphism invariance), which is applied to potentially observable cosmological effects. The work provides answers to the following questions:  How can the dynamics of quantum states of matter and geometry be defined in a diffeomorphism-invariant way? What is the relevant space of physical...