What's the greatest range of orders of magnitude?

Resistivity has a quite impressive range--for example, the resistivity of teflon is about $10^{30}$ times higher than the resistivity of copper.

So I think "resistivity of different materials" might be the winner, or at least a contender, for most orders of magnitude ratio of quantities that can and often do come up naturally in everyday life.


Your question is pretty vague, but I will restrict it to mean: what is the physical property with the largest range of measured values. This is still probably subjective, but it's a little more manageable and fun to think about anyway.

Here's one possibility: range of measured half-lives of radioactive isotopes (see wiki list). The shortest measured half-life (that of hydrogen-7) is order $10^{-23}$ seconds, and the longest (that of tellurium-128) is order $10^{31}$ seconds, so they span an amazing 54 orders of magnitude in all.

This is kind of ridiculous. It is more than the ratio between the size of a proton and the size of the observable universe, which are separated by a mere 41 orders of magnitude (maybe this is what your quote is supposed to say?), and it is about the difference between the Planck length and a light-year (!). It's fun to think about what the experimental challenges must be making measurements on both ends of that spectrum. Both ends (particularly the long-time end) are bounded by experimental ability, so this is not too far from being a list of the range of times over which we can measure anything. Naturally, that means it is subject to change. For example, we've been looking for proton decay for a long time, but all we can say right now is that the lifetime must be more than order $10^{39}$ seconds. If we ever find it this range will shoot at least another hundred million times larger.