If the speed of light were smaller than it is, would relativistic phenomena be more or less conspicuous than they are now.
Answers
Explanation:
If the speed of light were smaller than what it is now, what relativistic phenomenal be more or less conspicuous?
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This question makes no sense no matter how it is framed. The speed of light determines the speed of time relative to length, more or less. In order for the question to be meaningful, one would have to change the electromagnetic coupling but not change (for example) gravitation or the nuclear forces, which would be difficult in a proper theory of everything in which they are all supposedly one force.
If one changes all of the coupling constants together, this is (I am pretty sure) an example of a conformal transformation which is basically a rescaling of everything in a way that precisely preserves relative magnitudes. In which case, we couldn’t even tell that it happened. To put it another way, the entire Universe could be shrinking, or expanding, in such a way that the relative scale of length, time, mass, charge, and all of the various couplings remained relatively the same and nothing would change. We couldn’t even tell that this was happening without a way to view the system from “outside” in some way.
Now, if you start changing the electromagnetic coupling independent of gravitation and nuclear coupling (assuming such a thing is consistently possible) one of the first “conspicuous” phenomena would be everybody dying as chemistry alters and nuclei destabilize so that stars explode or collapse, stuff like that, unless the changes are very, very tiny. Note that even a small change in the ratio of the electrodynamic to nuclear to gravitational forces would accelerate or slow down fusion rates inside the sun quite dramatically as charges compress or expand relative to gravity and fusion becomes more or less likely at the equilibrium separation mostly determined by the balance between gravitational attraction and electrodynamic/quantum repulsion at very high pressures and temperatures.
If you want to imagine what would happen if the speed of light were slower (but things still happened at normal speed) just read Terry Prachett’s Diskworld series. In his highly imaginary and magical world, the speed of light IS much smaller than it is here, so slow that a really fast person can just about outrun it. But there it is all in good fun, and Prachett doesn’t cause relativistic contraction of the landscape of the runners…:-)